LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



8 



ELIJAH, 



THE FAVORED MAN, 



A Life and Us Lessons for To-day. 






BY 

ROBERT M. 'PATTERSON, 
H 

Author of " Paradise : The Place and State of Saved Souls 
between Death and the Resurrection;" "Visions 
of Heaven for the Life on Earth," 




PHILADELPHIA : 

PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION, 

1334 CHESTNUT STREET. 






COPYRIGHT, 1880, BY 

THE TRUSTEES OF THE 

PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION. 



Westcott & Thomson, 
Stcreolypers and Electrotype™, Philada. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 



Much of the interest and power of the 
Bible is lost by an exclusive textual preach- 
ing and by fragmentary reading in verses 
or chapters. 

We gain greatly by comprehensive views 
of one of its books or of one of its lives, 
and by reading therein the lessons for all 
time for which the record has been pre- 
served. In the study of the inspired Word 
the microscope alone should not be used; 
the telescope brings to light beautiful and 
surprising discoveries. 

Among the human lives of the Bible, that 
of Elijah stands on a peculiar plane. It is 



4 INTRODUCTORY NOTE, 

clothed with an interest in its simple story 
and in its suggestive instructions which is 
unapproachable by any other. 

My object in this volume is to exhibit 
the biography itself in a clear and con- 
nected form; to deduce three of the most 
important series of permanent lessons for 
which, it seems to me, it was embalmed in 
the sacred Book ; and to analyze the cha- 
racter of the man in order to ascertain 
wherein he should be a model for us 
all. 

I hope the work will be found adapted 
not merely to Christians of advanced age, 
but to Sabbath-school members. The plot 
and incidents of a story pervade the scrip- 
tural narrative sufficiently to interest those 
whose taste has been unhappily developed 
in such a way as to receive entertainment 
and instruction only through the form of 
the novel; while its pro founder revelations 
of God, of nature, of humanity, of redemp- 
tion, cannot be exhausted by the lifelong 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 5 

study of the most advanced and thorough 
student. 

It is not surprising that so much has 
been written and published in reference to 
this great and prominent character. But 
I am not aware that it has before been 
dealt with in the form which I have here 
adopted, or that it has been brought to 
bear upon modern life in the manner in 
which I employ it. Hence I venture to 
send the treatise forth with the prayer that 
the Spirit of God will bless it to the devel- 
opment of a type of piety which is greatly 
needed in our day and our land. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.. 3 



I. 

THE LIFE m 13-57 

The Unique Position of Elijah 13 

Preceding History of Israel.. 14 

Ahab and Jezebel 16 

Religion of Baal and Astarte... 18 

Scientific Skepticism of Our Day 21 

Its Immoral Tendency 22 

Secular Education 24 

Persecution by Jezebel 26 

Elijah's Early Life 29 

His First Appearance 30 

Description of him 30 

His Message to Ahab 31 

Withdrawal to Cherith 32 

Fed by Ravens 33 

Pigeons in St. Mark's, Venice 33 

In Sarepta 35 

Death and Resurrection of the Child 37 

7 



8 CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

The Three Years' Drought 38 

The Struggle on Carmel 41 

The Flight \ 45 

Under the Juniper Tree 46 

At Mount Horeb 47 

God's Revelation of his Working 48 

Naboth *. 49 

Ahaziah and the Three Bands 51 

The Translation 52 

At the Transfiguration of Jesus 54 

The Perpetual Ministry 55 

" Alone" 56 

II. 

GOD AND NATURE 58-101 

Elijah in the Presence of Ahab 58 

The Story in Brief. 59 

Nature-Lessons : 

(1) God's Control over Nature 67 

The Doctrine of the Bible and of Science 67 

Uniformity of Nature 68 

Three Miraculous Bible Periods 69 

The Deliverance from Egypt 69 

Christ's Earthly Life 69 

Elijah and Elisha 70 

Every recorded Act of Elijah miraculous *J\ 

(2) Nature's Forces used for Moral Purposes 76 

The Physical and Moral Intermingled 77 

A False Judgment guarded against 81 

The Tower in Siloam 81 



CONTENTS. 9 

PAGE 

The Galileans' Death 82 

Job 83 

Innocent Suffer here with Guilty 83 

The Rule about Nations 84 

Hence Responsibility of Private Citizens 85 

Sins against Individuals grievous , 88 

Naboth's Case ^ 

Public Plunderers 89 

(3) Natural Sufferings do not Reclaim 89 

The Drought 90 

The Carmel Judgment 90 

Sentence for Sin against Naboth 90 

Jezebel Hardened 91 

Lord Byron 92 

The Great Teaching of the Horeb Revelation 93 

Of Elijah's Ministry contrasted with Christ's., 95 

The Conversation about the Samaritan Village... 97 

The Redeemer's Life and Mission 98 

His Followers to Win by Kindness alone 99 



III. 

GOD'S WORK AND HIS AGENTS 102-137 

Effect of Carmel Conflict :— 

On the People 102 

On Ahab.... 102 

On Jezebel.. 103 

Her Threat 104 

The Prophet Discouraged....* 105 

The Various Explanations , 107 



IO CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

A Natural Reaction 108 

Exhibited in Others IIO 

Even in the Redeemer ill 

God's Dealings with Elijah 112 

Strengthened by Food and Sleep 112 

By Communion with Nature 112 

By Revelation of the True Church 113 

By a Companion 114 

By Refused Prayer for Death 114 

(1) Breaks Permitted by God in his Work 116 

Leaders Needed 116 

The Slowness with which God works 121 

(2) Apparent Failures 124 

Elijah's Mission seemed a Failure 125 

John the Baptist's 126 

Christ's 127 

But no Real Failure 128 

The English Rebellion 129 

(3) God's Tenderness toward the Depressed 134 

Did not Reprove Elijah , 134 

Provides for his People 135 

IV. 

THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY 138-176 

The Scriptural Kaleidoscope 138 

New Testament References to Elijah 141 

(1) The Church Indestructible 141 

The Seven Thousand 142 

England in Reformation Times 143 



CONTENTS. 1 1 

PAGE 

Europe under the Papacy 148 

No Adherent of God is Alone 149 

Obadiahs among Public Men 150 

(2) The Catholicity of our Religion 151 

The Widow of Sarepta 151 

Jewish Narrowness 153 

Salvation never Confined to Visible Church 154 

Not in Ancient Times 154 

Not Now 157 

Intercourse with the Irreligious and Immoral 157 

(3) Immortality 159 

Old Testament Motives from Present Life 159 

But Immortality Taught therein 162 

Restoration of the Widow's Son 1 63 

Translation of Elijah 165 

Reappearance at Tabor 168 

Death in the Midst of Work 171 

V. 

CHARACTER AND TRAINING OF THE MAN... 177-215 

Malachi's Prophecy 177 

John the Baptist 180 

Influence of a Chivalrous Life 183 

" Subject to Like Passions " 186 

Varieties in Character 186 

Elijah's Overmastering Devotion to God 188 

(1) A Righteous Man 188 

Therefore Powerful in Prayer 189 

Especially Righteous toward God 191 



12 CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Not a Weathercock 192 

(2) His Piety Active 193 

Passive Piety 193 

Jealous for God, yet Gentle 195 

Bunyan 197 

(3) His Intrepid Courage 198 

Yielding Men 199 

Need of Faithful Courage 202 

Its Possessors not Popular 203 

The Basis of Elijah's Character : 

1. Great Physical Strength 204 

Influence of Body on Mind 204 

Voltaire 205 

Samuel Johnson 206 

Nerves 208 

Abstinence from Vice 208 

From Intoxicating Liquors 209 

2. Private Meditation and Prayer 209 

Rest a Necessity 211 

Study of God's Word 213 

"Greater than Elijah" 215 



ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 




THE LIFE. 

HE prophet Elijah has been called 
" the grandest and the most roman- 
tic character that Israel ever pro- 
duced." He bursts upon the sacred page 
with the suddenness of a meteor ; he shines 
high up as a star of the first magnitude in 
the kingdom of heaven for ever. Because 
of his character and his work he was exalted 
by God to an eminence to which no other 
man has been advanced. He is one of the 
two human beings who never died, but were 
translated to the glory of heaven without 

13 



1 4 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

suffering the infliction of sin's sharpest 
sting — Enoch being the other. He v was 
also one of the two who came down from 
heaven on the night of Christ's transfigu- 
ration on earth, and amid the preternatural 
splendor of the mount communed with the 
Redeemer about his approaching exodus — 
Moses being the other. Thus favored with 
Enoch in the one way, and with Moses in 
the other, he was distinguished as each of 
them was not. 

Our attention is therefore challenged to 
him as the most extraordinary of the sons 
of men. The Elijah of the Old Testament, 
the Elias of the New (the first is the He- 
brew form of his name, the second the 
Greek), he is, in his person, his life, his 
mission, worthy of careful study, that we 
may learn what in him was exceptional 
and what may be imitated. 

When this magnificent man made his 
appearance upon the stage of the sacred 
history the kingdom of Israel had existed 



THE LIFE. IS 

for sixty-five years. The heinous sin of Jer- 
oboam, the first king of that schismatic 
government, had been working out its 
legitimate results.* After a reign of twen- 
ty-two years Jeroboam had been succeeded 
by his son Ahijah ; but in fulfillment of 
God's threatened judgment on account of 
the crime of his father, Ahijah and all his 
relatives were in two years destroyed by a 
conspirator, Baasha. The successful reg- 
icide sat upon the throne for twenty-four 
years, and was followed by Elah his son, 
who in two years was assassinated, in a 
drunken fit, by one of his officers, Zimri, 
who also destroyed all the other descend- 
ants of Baasha because of his sins. Zimri, 
in return, after a phosphorescent glow of 
seven days, was overcome by Omri, who 

* It ought to be noted, as having a significancy for all time, 
that under Jeroboam " the defection of Israel did not consist in 
rejecting Jehovah as a false god, or in renouncing the Law of 
Moses as a false religion, but in joining foreign worship and 
idolatrous ceremonies to the ritual of the true God." — Warbur- 
ton's Divine Legation, b. v., sec. 3. 



1 6 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

was called to the throne by the army. 
The people, however, divided in the choice. 
Half of them followed another man, Tibni ; 
but after a six years' civil war Omri and his 
faction conquered, and for six years he 
reigned as undisputed king. Thus a suc- 
cession of internal convulsions racked the 
state and blasted its prospects. 

Omri plunged the nation very decidedly 
down the inclined plane of religious declen- 
sion. Jeroboam, the first king, had estab- 
lished an unscriptural worship, had himself 
participated in it, and had thus thrown the 
influence of his authority and example in 
favor of his gross departure from the 
religion which God had prescribed. But 
Omri seems to have gone further, and by 
law to have compelled the people to adopt 
this false worship. 

Thus swayed by royal example and co- 
erced by illegally-legal enactments, the 
nation was weakened and prepared for 
the terrific plunge which it took under 



THE LIFE. 17 

Ahab, the son of Omri, who reigned for 
twenty-two years. Down to his time Je- 
hovah had been nominally recognized, 
though worshiped in a forbidden manner ; 
under him Jehovah was repudiated utterly, 
and the vilest of heathen and vicious re- 
ligions was enthroned and established in 
the Holy Land. 

The sweeping record about Ahab is : 
"Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the 
sight of the Lord above all that were be- 
fore him. And it came to pass, as if it had 
been a light thing for him to walk in the 
sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, that 
he took to wife Jezebel the daughter of 
Ethbaal king of the Zidonians, and went 
and served Baal, and worshiped him. And 
he reared up an altar for Baal in the house 
of Baal, which he had built in Samaria. 
And Ahab made a grove ; and Ahab did 
more to provoke the Lord God of Israel 
to anger than all the kings of Israel that 
were before him." 1 Kings xvi. 30-33. 



1 8 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

Thus a woman who had been born in a 
licentious heathen house was elevated to 
the highest seat in Israel, and all the ener- 
gy of her soul was used " to eradicate the 
worship of Jehovah and establish the rites 
of her own national deities, Baal and 
Astarte." 

Baal, the sun ; Astarte, the moon — the 
male and the female, the generative and 
the receptive powers of nature — these were 
the deities which in the Phoenician Tyre 
and Sidon had been exalted to the throne 
of religious worship. 

The religion was one which was quite 
widespread in the East, and was the more 
prevalent because " its real strength lay in 
the appeal it made to man's worst passions. 
Its root-idea seems to have been a wor- 
ship of natural power and of material 
force ; while, practically, its service was a 
consecration of vice and filth under the 
guise of reverence for the teeming life 
and glory of the universe. " 



THE LIFE. 19 

11 No form of idolatry could have been 
more fearfully the opposite of all that God 
had desired for his people. A worship of 
Nature, of mere strength and power — such 
is the meaning of Baal, rather than faith 
in a righteous will governing nature for 
moral purposes — brought with it, as it ever 
must, the most degrading consequences. 
The uncleanness which formed so great a 
part of the authorized worship, and which 
stood in such woeful contrast to the rigor- 
ous washing from all defilement enjoined 
by the Mosaic law, is but a symbol of the 
tendency of all Nature-worship in what- 
ever form it may gain ascendency. The 
service of Baalim, gross as it was, yet 
may find a true counterpart in modern 
times. Let men permit their minds to be 
so overwhelmed by the thought of the vast 
forces which acquaintance with physical 
laws informs us of as to see nothing in 
Nature but the regular fulfillment of a 
great mechanism, so fixed and inexorable 



20 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

that the workings of the divine will, ruling 
for moral purposes, must cease to be be- 
lieved in ; let the same reasoning which is 
applied to blind material forces be intro- 
duced into the region of morals, and the 
value of personal will be denied, — then fatal- 
ism must ensue, and all that we do or feel 
be regarded as but a necessary result over 
which we have no control : we shall wor- 
ship force, not God, a system, not a right- 
eous Father; responsibility will become 
illogical, for evil must then be viewed as 
forming a part of a great plan ; and the 
grand practical result of such one-sided 
science will be in the end none other than 
that of the basest of old creature-worships, 
the being given up to vile affections. We 
are entering on this inclined plane when, 
denying the sphere of miracle as the com- 
ing in of a divine will for righteous ends, 
we subject the moral to the material ; and 
the chain of logic which leads thence to 
irresponsibility consists of but few links*. 



THE LIFE. 21 

Baal, the lord of force, ever sits enthroned 
beside Astarte the licentious."* 

This is the charge which we make 
against the materialism of the skeptical 
yet credulous scientists of the day — against 
the Nature- worship of which men like Tyn- 
dall and Huxley are the high priests. It is 
the successor, though higher in form and as 
yet restrained from its practical moral de- 
basement, of Baal the sun-god, the god of 
force. Indeed, the first catchword of this 
modern system is Force, Force— the Force 
which in varying forms runs through na- 
ture, constitutes nature, causes all the 
transformations of existence. It is a force, 
too, which has its mighty seat in the sun, 
and which in a stern, inexorable, undevia- 
ting progress has been evolving itself 
through all the past and shall be through 
all the future. Blind, blind nature ! poten- 
tial forces marching on with remorseless 
tread ! This system does not make all its 

* The Rev. Donald McLeod in Sunday Magazine, i., 860. 



22 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

advocates impure and immoral. It has its 
higher intellectual side, which leads captive 
a few who study nature alone. But so 
had the old horrid system of Jezebel " an 
esoteric meaning for the cultured and the 
initiated/' which gave it a " fascinating 
power " over them. It had its " mystic mean- 
ings, through which the more thoughtful 
minds sought to sublimate the evil into an 
occult philosophy." Through the mass of 
its adherents, however, and especially down 
through the rude, the uncultured, and the 
unrestrained, it spread the very leprosy of 
impurity. Similar would be the result of 
the widespread prevalence of its scientific 
successor of modern times.* 

* It is humiliating to human nature that the irreligious science 
of the day, which tramples on the divine Jesus, has not ad- 
vanced beyond the teachings of the Roman Lucretius, who died 
about half a century before Jesus was born. Thus, Mallock, in 
his Lucretius (p. 161), says : " If we consider the general result of 
his teaching, his first principles and his last conclusions — if we 
consider these as he taught them, and not the ways by which he 
arrived at and supported them — we shall see that, as far as these 
go, his message to the world and that of modern science is prac- 



THE LIFE. 23 

Two of the careful scientific men of the 
day open a treatise which they have lately 
published with the confession of this truth. 
Individual immortality is one of the fun- 
damental doctrines of a true spiritual re- 
ligion. It is a doctrine, how r ever, which the 
scientific heresy denies. And these writers 
candidly say : " The great mass of mankind 
have always believed, in some fashion, in 
the immortality of the soul ; but it is certain 
that we may find disbelievers in this doc- 

tically identical. Human life, in both systems, is the same mo- 
mentary phenomenon in the great and everchanging evolu- 
tion of things. It is the result of a power that knew not what 
it did in creating it. A little while it is, and again a little while 
and it is not. It is but a bubble on the surface of the great flux 
of matter. It is an isolated thing, connected with no interests 
beyond itself. It is to be judged of and ordered with reference 
to itself solely. It is to be valued solely on account of its pres- 
ent resources, and all these resources are to be expressed in 
terms of conscious and of realized happiness. Lucretius says 
this as distinctly, and thought he could prove it as surely, as 
Professor Huxley or Auguste Comte. In relation to human life, 
then — in relation, that is, to the thing that alone gives anything 
any interest for us — the materialism of Lucretius and the mate- 
rialism of our own day are in exactly the same position." 



24 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

trine who retain the nobler attributes of 
humanity. It may, however, be questioned 
if it be possible even to imagine the great 
bulk of our race to have lost their belief in 
the soul's immortality and yet to have re- 
tained the virtues of civilized and well-or- 
dered communities. ,, * 

Nothing could be more disastrous in its 
influence, moral and political, on the mass 
of the people, than the adoption and prev- 
alence of the strictly secular principle of 
education in our school and collegiate sys- 
tem. Let revealed truths be utterly ig- 
nored ; let the teachings of science be 
circulated in forms which contain nature 
and its operations without any reference to 
the divine power which is in, through and 
above nature ; let the instruction all be 
about the forces of matter as if they were 
fatalized developments — and the masses 
of the people would soon be in a position 
that would parallel the condition of the 

* The Unseen Universe, p. I. 



THE LIFE. 25 

subjects of the old Baal- and Astarte-wor- 
ship. The foundation of all moral law 
would be swept away, and the multitude 
would grow more vile than the French 
Communists ever were. One of the great 
lessons taught by Grecian history is that 
mere intellectual knowledge does not pu- 
rify the heart and moralize the life. It 
" showed to all future time the weakness of 
man's highest powers if unassisted from 
above." * 

Ahab and Jezebel introduced the low and 
vicious system of Nature-religion into the 
kingdom of Israel. It became the court 
religion. Splendid temples were erected 
as the seats of its worship. Images of its 
goddess, Ashtoreth, abounded. Four hun- 
dred and fifty of its priests were scattered 
through the land to seduce the people to it. 
Four hundred more were supported at the 
table of the queen. The foul leprosy, 
whitening the walls of the royal palace in 

*Conybeare and Howson, i. 11. 



26 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

Samaria, extended itself over all the land 
and down to all ranks. Compulsion was 
also resorted to for the purpose of extend- 
ing it. The first religious persecution that 
we read of in the history of the world was 
in its interest. 

Christian sects have time and again dis- 
graced themselves by endeavoring to com- 
pel others to embrace their tenets and by 
dealing cruelly with those who would not 
do so. But in that they departed from the 
essential spirit of the gospel. They learned 
it, moreover, from heathenism. The law 
of Moses was not persecuting in its nature. 
From the first, heathen could dwell in the 
promised land and under the protection 
of the inspired code without being com- 
pelled to become Jews in religion. The 
laws of Christ do not persecute. As the 
papacy was developed it exhibited the taint 
of Roman heathenism, which had, at an ear- 
lier day, persecuted Christians. Protest- 
ants who have persecuted were overcome 



THE LIFE. 

by the leaven of the heathenism and the 
papacy which remained in them.* 

Under Ahab and Jezebel there was a 
most bitter persecution of the worshipers 
of Jehovah. Then commenced what Ne- 
hemiah in his prayer four hundred and fifty 
years later referred to : " Nevertheless, 
they were disobedient and rebelled against 
thee, and cast thy law behind their backs, 
and slew thy prophets, which testified 
against them to turn them to thee, and 
they wrought great provocations/' Jez- 
ebel " cut off the prophets of the Lord." 
She tried to make a clean sweep of them, 

* Dean Stanley, in his History of the Eastern Church (p. 339, 
Am. ed.), calls attention to the fact that the first persecution of 
Christian by Christian " arose not from the orthodox against 
the orthodox, but from the heretics against the orthodox." 
The treatment to which the great Athanasius was subjected, 
he says, furnishes " the first signal instance of the strange sight 
of Christians persecuting Christians." He adds (p. 349), "that 
it was a maxim of Athanasius that ' the duty of orthodoxy is 
not to compel, but to persuade, belief.' " Even Lecky con- 
fesses {History of Rationalism in Europe, ii. 22), that "in this 
respect the orthodox seem to have been for a time honorably dis- 
tinguished even from the Arians." 



28 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

and it was only by a shrewd and dangerous 
device of Obadiah, the governor of the 
king's household, who remained faithful 
at the court, that any of them were pre- 
served. He rescued a hundred of them, 
and hid them in two caves, and by stealth 
fed them with bread and water. So de- 
structive was the work of the persecutors, 
so subservient seemed the people, and so 
universally did they appear to adopt the 
false religion, that Elijah thought he was 
the only person who remained true to the 
divine cause. And when God disabused 
his mind of that impression, all that the 
Omniscient One could say was that there 
were seven thousand people in all the 
land who had not bowed to Baal. Of 
the more than four million inhabitants 
who composed the nation, all except 
seven thousand had either yielded to the 
blandishments of error, and with the heart 
received it, or by fear of suffering and 
death had professed to yield to it. 



THE LIFE. 29 

Thus the nation had gone down into a pit 
of horrid blackness. The true religion had 
been overthrown. A licentious system 
had been enthroned in its place. The can- 
cer of a vile and filthy immorality disfigured 
and was eating out the life of the land. 

Elijah the Tishbite was living in the 
country east of the Jordan, and farthest 
from the influence of the apostate court. 
In solitude he was brooding over the de- 
gradation of his people. His stern theo- 
cratic soul waxed indignant and rose in 
holy rebellion against the despotism of 
vice. The energy of his nature first 
found utterance in the prayer that Je- 
hovah would interpose and maintain his 
own cause. As against that religion of 
force which was exalting itself, he prayed 
that a drought and a famine might sweep 
down upon the land to bring the people 
to their senses. The prayer was God's 
own inspiration. The prophet believed 
that it would be answered. 



30 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

Suddenly, after Ahab had been eight or 
ten years on the throne, the trans-Jordanic 
messenger from God broke into the pres- 
ence of the sinful king. The apparition 
must have been a repulsive one to the 
dainty eye of the monarch who had erect- 
ed and lived in an ivory palace and who 
dressed in purple and fared sumptuously. 

Bring together and behold the descrip- 
tions which are given in different places 
of the appearance of Elijah, so as to get 
a definite view of his person and manner 
of life : 

" Long, shaggy hair floating over his 
back, and a large rough mantle of sheep- 
skin fastened around his loins by a girdle 
of hide was his only covering. ,, His figure 
was awful and wild; his countenance and 
his voice were stern and unbroken ; his 
garb was " scanty." 

Not attractive in appearance, surely! 
Not such a man as society would with 
pleasure receive into its circle! Not at 



THE LIFE. 31 

all pleasant to the dainty and silken Ahab. 
But the style of man that God has used 
in times of deep declension and odious 
vice to startle and shock communities. 
John the Baptist, Luther, Knox, somewhat 
in the same mould, have been sent into 
the world from time to time. 

The message which the prophet an- 
nounced to the king was more alarming 
than his appearance. For three years 
and six months neither rain nor dew 
should bless the land. As the court and 
the people had accepted the idol-worship 
of the sun, the furnace of all earth's forces, 
God would show that he controlled that 
sun, and could use it as a burning agent 
to punish those who had deified it. For 
three and a half years the face of the 
scorching luminary should never be hid- 
den from view by day, nor, in her season, 
should the moon by night be covered by 
any mantle. No clouds should float 
through the air or drop their golden glob- 



/ 



32 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

ules of wealth and comfort. Neither 
rain nor snow should descend upon the 
land to cool and fructify it. No dew- 
pearls should lightly rest upon the turf. 
The rivers and streamlets should dry up. 
The fruits of the earth should fail. The 
grass should be scorched, burned, destroy- 
ed. Men and cattle should lose their 
subsistence. Very terrible indeed in the 
hand of the Creator would be the sun and 
its stored-up forces to rebuke those who 
had enthroned it as a god. 

The man who carried such a message 
to royal ears could not be safe within the 
reach of the strong-minded and blood- 
thirsty heatheness who, with an iron rod, 
ruled her weak-minded husband, and his 
perverted subjects as well. Therefore, 
God commanded Elijah to hide himself 
while the judgment was slowly and in- 
exorably working itself out upon the land. 

First, he retired to the neighborhood 
of a brook running into the Jordan, and 



\ 



THE LIFE. 33 



there every morning and evening fed upon 
bread and flesh which ravens, against the in- 
stinct of their nature, but under the control- 
ling influence of their Maker, brought to him. 
In the Place of St. Mark, Venice, we 
once saw flocks of pigeons, which, by 
nature timid and ready to fly away at the 
sound of a human step near them, had 
been so trained by men that, at the stroke 
of the bell, at two o'clock in the afternoon 
of every day, they flew from all quarters 
to a particular window in a corner of the 
place to be fed on corn as it was rained 
out upon them. We saw them not mere- 
ly flutter around the window to receive 
their supply from well-known hands, but 
drop down fearlessly among the specta- 
tors who from various parts of the world 
had gathered together to witness the 
scene. A dozen at a time hopped upon 
our knees, and crept up upon our shoul- 
ders, and picked the corn from our hands. 
Seeing, in that, one instance of mans power 



34 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

over birds of the air, we have no trouble 
in believing that God could so employ the 
ravens — whose habits were carnivorous, 
living on flesh and seeking for it every- 
where, and which the Mosaic law did not 
permit to be eaten by its subjects — as to 
make them daily carry necessary food to 
one of his famishing servants. 

It is one of the shameful and sinful com- 
icalities of a skeptical interpretation of 
God's book that a writer has advanced the 
idea that Elijah merely plundered the ra- 
vens' nests of hares and other game, and 
thus was fed by them. The inspired his- 
tory " knows nothing of bird-catching and 
nest-robbing, but acknowledges the Lord 
and Creator of the creatures, who com- 
manded the ravens to provide his servant 
with bread and flesh. ,, 

But it came to pass after a while that for 
want of rain the brook from which Elijah 
drank dried up. It was necessary for him 
to go elsewhere. 



THE LIFE. 35 

Away, then, from the lonely retirement 
of a recluse amid " the bare, desolate hills 
of the wilderness of Judea, in whose fast- 
nesses David had been able to bid defiance 
to Saul " — away to a city, but, strange to 
say, a city in the heathen country of Sidon, 
from which the infamous queen had come ! 
As he approached its gate, wayworn, thirsty 
and faint, he met a widow whose heart God 
inclined to deal generously with him. She 
gave him a cup of the cold water that had 
not yet failed in that region, and though, in 
her despair, having only a handful of meal 
in ajar and a little oil in a cruse, she was 
hunting sticks to make a fire wherewith 
she might cook what she supposed would be 
the last meal for herself and her only son, 
still, on the strength of the prophet's as- 
surance that her little supply should not 
fail, but should keep on reproducing itself 
until the return of the blessing of rain, she 
made him first a little cake. His promise 
was fulfilled. The woman entertained the 



36 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

prophet, and the God of the prophet kept 
her supply unexhausted.* 

* " Is thy cruse of comfort failing ? Rise and share it with an- 
other, 

And through all the years of famine it shall serve thee and thy 
brother. 

Love divine will fill thy storehouse or thy handful still renew ; 

Scanty fare for one will often make a royal feast for two. 

" P'or the heart grows rich in giving ; all its wealth is living 

grain : 
Seeds which mildew in the garner, scattered, fill with gold the 

plain. 
Is thy burden hard and heavy? Do thy steps drag wearily? 
Help to bear thy brother's burden ; God will bear both it and 

thee. 

" Numb and weary on the mountains, wouldst thou sleep amidst 

the snow ? 
Chafe that frozen form beside thee, and together both shall 

glow. 
Art thou stricken in life's battle ? Many wounded round thee 

moan ; 
Lavish on their wounds thy balsam, and that balm shall heal 

thine own. 

" Is the heart a well left empty ? None but God its void can 
fill; 
Nothing but a ceaseless fountain can its ceaseless longings 
still. 



THE LIFE. 37 

A year had passed when a sad event 
happened in the hospitable home. The 
poor widow's boy fell sick and died. The 
affliction quickened the mother's memory 
of her sinful life. She looked upon the 
blow as a judgment on account of trans- 
gression, and upbraided the prophet for 
having been the instrument in bringing 
the infliction upon her. But, taking the cold 
body in his bony arms to his own room, as 
he had by prayer closed the windows of 
heaven in wrath upon his sinful land, so he 
by the same power brought life back to the 
boy and restored him to the arms of the 
mourning parent. 

It is interesting to note, though we place 
not the statement on a level with the clear 
facts which are imbedded in the inspired 
pages, and are not called upon to receive 
it implicitly, that tradition identified this 

Is the heart a living power ? Self- entwined, its strength sinks 

low ; 
It can only live in loving, and by serving love will grow."' — 
The Women of the Gospel, and Other Poems, p. 181. 



38 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

child of the widow of Zarephath (Sarepta), 
the boy who attended Elijah to the wilder- 
ness after the conflict on Carmel, the youth 
who anointed Jehu by the direction of Eli- 
sha, and the prophet Jonah, as one and 
the same. " In this boy (so later ages de- 
lighted to believe) was recovered the first 
prophet of the Gentile world, Jonah, the 
son of Amittai ; repaying, in his mission of 
mercy and pity to the Assyrian Nineveh, 
the mercy and pity which his mother had 
shown to the Israelite wanderer." * 

For three years Elijah remained con- 
cealed in his foreign shelter. The drought 
continued. " Week after week, month af- 
ter month, the blazing sun rose and sunk 
without a cloud. Season gave place to sea- 
son, yet no change until that most fright- 
ful of Eastern scourges, want of water, fell 
with all its dire consequences. Each day 
the heavens were as brass, the horizon dim 
with the haze of heat, the sun an eye of 

* Stanley's History of the Jezuish Church, ii. 331. 



THE LIFE. 39 

fire, the earth baked and cracked and hard 
as iron. Night after night, over a dry 
and dewless earth, rose that moon, sacred 
sign of Ashtoreth, bringing no relief to 
those who hymned her cold beauty. Day 
after day, that sun, symbol of Baal, burn- 
ed down like a vengeance on his worship- 
pers. " * 

Horrid famine followed, stalking with its 
gaunt form through country and town, and 
at last entering even the richly-provided 
royal city. The regal supplies gave out. 
The pampered horses and mules of the 
king's stables were dying. Ahab and Oba- 
diah divided the land between them, in or- 
der to pick from the water-line of any foun- 
tains or brooks that might not yet have 
been entirely dried up grass enough to save 
the horses that were still alive. 

No humbling effect, however, seems to 
have been produced by the long-continued 
judgment on the court or people. Another 

* Sunday Magazine, i. 863. 



4-0 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

move must be made in the campaign that 
was beinor wa^ed. 

While the prophet kept himself hidden 
in retirement Ahab had been making per- 
sistent and varied efforts to find him. Eli- 
jah had declared that rain should only come 
according to his word. Doubtless the king 
sought " to get him into his power, with the 
view of either inflicting vengeance upon 
him or of endeavoring to compel him to 
procure the desired blessing/' Therefore, 
he made the most earnest inquisition in all 
the kingdoms round for the abiding-place 
of the man whom he considered to be the 
troubler of Israel. 

But now the time had arrived for the 
prophet, under God's direction, to show 
himself voluntarily to the suffering but in- 
censed monarch, and to fight a battle which 
should condense into one day, and in a more 
fiery manner, the great truths which the 
gradual judgment of three and a half years 
should have burned into the national mind 



THE LIFE. 41 

From the quiet home in Zarephath the 
story therefore transports us to Mount Car- 
mel, one of Nature's grand scenes, overlook- 
ing the blue and glittering Mediterranean 
Sea to the west, and the valley of Jezreel, 
the fairest portion of the Holy Land, and 
one of the great battle-fields of the world, 
to the east. The prophet had directed the 
king, when he encountered him on his re- 
turn from Zarephath, to summon the priests 
of Baal and of the grove to meet him there, 
that between them a mighty spiritual duel 
might be fought which should show to the 
Israelites who ought to be recognized as 
their Lord. The four hundred and fifty 
prophets of Baal responded to the sum- 
mons. The four hundred of the groves 
who lived at Jezebel's table, perhaps influ- 
enced by her or suspecting the object and 
confident of their failure, did not put in an 
appearance. 

Then came one of the stirring events in 
the history of the world. The king, the 



42 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

false prophets and the representatives of 
the people were gathered together before 
the shaggy and stern minister of God. 
He taunted the multitude with their halt- 
ing gait between the worship of the true 
deity, whom they had never formally re- 
nounced, and that of Baal, to whom they 
had been seduced in practice. Then he 
challenged the priests of Baal to a contest 
of fire — he on one side, the four hundred 
and fifty on the other ! Let him and them 
each take a bullock and in turn call upon 
the God whom they honored, and let the 
power who should send down fire from heav- 
en to consume the sacrifice be recognized as 
the true God and with the whole heart be 
obeyed ! 

Forced into the trial by the approval of 
the people, the four hundred and fifty 
Baalites prepared their bullock for the 
sacrifice. In the early morning, as their 
sun-god rose above the horizon, they call- 
ed upon him to hear them. As he burned 



THE LIFE. 43 

upon them from the zenith they reiterated 
their cry. As he slowly moved downward 
toward the western horizon with no an- 
swering voice or sign, they danced around 
the altar and cut themselves with knives 
and lancets, in the agony of their prayer, 
until their blood gushed out, while Elijah 
mocked them with a cutting irony about 
the possible habits of their god : " Cry 
aloud: for he is a god; either he med- 
itateth, or he is pursuing, or he is in a 
journey, or peradventure he sleepeth and 
must be awaked. " But the burning red 
ball sank out of sight beyond the Mediter- 
ranean, leaving the bullock unconsumed, 
untouched. 

Elijah erected his altar, and having 
drenched it and the bullock and the wood 
and the ditch around it with water, so as 
to preclude all idea of a collusive proceed- 
ing, he called upon Jehovah, the covenant 
God of Israel, to show that he was indeed 
God, and that the petitioner his prophet 



44 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

was acting according to his word. And 
scarcely ascended the words of the pray- 
er from his lips ere the fire of the Lord 
descended and consumed the burnt sacri- 
fice and the wood and the stones and the 
dust, and licked up the water that was in 
the trench. 

The victory was complete. The people 
shouted the verdict. Under the command 
of the inspired man as the executioner of 
God's will, they slew the false and treason- 
able prophets. 

Then Elijah announced to the paralyzed 
king that the unparalleled drought was at 
an end. And as the chariot of the mon- 
arch hastened toward Jezreel, with the 
prophet running at its side, the heavens 
became black with clouds and there was 
a great rain. 

The enthusiasm of the people for the 
Jehovah of their fathers had been kindled 
anew by the fire from heaven. Perhaps 



THE LIFE. 45^ 

the king also had been swept along on 
the wave of feeling. But the imperious 
queen remained unsubdued and defiant. 
Madly thirsting for the blood of the man 
of God, or, it may be, desiring to terrify 
him into a flight from the court and the 
city, where he would certainly possess po- 
tential influence after such a triumph, she 
sent him word that before to-morrow's sun 
went down his head should bite the dust. 
The prophet of fire and of undoubted 
courage was for once, and for the only 
time, cowed, and that by a woman's 
threat. " And he feared, and arose, and went 
for his life." Perhaps it is not to be won- 
dered at. He was a man of like passions 
with ourselves. His human nature had 
passed through an excitement which was 
necessarily followed by a reaction. The 
exhausted body weakened the mind. He 
feared and he fled. 

Doubtless, his flight set back the work 
of reformation. The people were left 



46 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

without a leader, and sank down again 
into their idolatry. 

" It was the crisis of his life." Only 
one out of that vast multitude who the 
day before shouted after the fire-miracle, 
" The Lord, he is God ! the Lord, he is 
God!" (we forget not how at a later day 
a similar multitude, who shouted Hosanna 
as Jesus entered Jerusalem, in a few hours 
cried, " Crucify him! crucify him !") — only one 
" remained faithful to him, the Zidonian boy 
of Zarephath, as Jewish tradition believed " 
— the boy whom he had brought back from 
death, and who afterward became the proph- 
et Jonah. 

Without stopping to think of the effects 
of his absence at such a critical time, Elijah 
hastened from Jezreel. Down through Is- 
rael and Judah he sped. The first night 
of his flight he rested under a broom tree, 
and in his depression of spirits asked the 
Lord to cut short his life. But, first, God 
gave his beloved, though temporarily de- 



THE LIFE. 47 

spondent, servant a refreshing sleep, and, 
afterward, by an angel, supplied him with 
bread and water, by which his strength 
was recuperated. Then onward again he 
went to the south-west, unto Mount Ho- 
reb, renowned in the history of Israel for 
its associations with Moses, the first re- 
vealer of the will of the Most High. 

There the Lord made to the prophet a 
remarkable typical representation of the 
real mode and force by which he works 
in the advancement of his cause. The 
exile had been disappointed. He had 
hoped that the fire which came down 
upon Carmel would burn away the false 
religion from the hearts of the nation, 
perhaps even melt the hard heart of the 
idolatrous queen. She had, however, re- 
mained rampant in her hatred of the true 
worship. And he had fled. He was 
jealous for Jehovah, but he stood alone 
and his life was sought. His ministry had 
been a failure. Force had been vain. 



48 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

One cannot stand against a multitude. 
" None follow him, and he is left alone, 
flying for his life from the sword which 
has slain his brethren. " But as he stood 
upon the mount a great and strong wind 
rent the mountains and broke in pieces 
the rocks before the Lord. An earth- 
quake upheaved the mountain from its 
base. The lightning burst forth and wrap- 
ped the wild scene in a blaze. Neither 
in the wind, the earthquake nor the fire, 
however, was the Lord. But, following 
them, a still small voice ! and that was 
the effective power of the Most High. 
Not by natural judgments, even the most 
terrifying and destructive, does he subdue 
and convert men, but by his gentle, gra- 
cious influence. 

Then he indicated to the prophet that his 
work would not fail in the end, though the 
successful result might not appear to him. 
And he commissioned him to seek and 
anoint as his successor Elisha, who in turn 



THE LIFE. 49 

should anoint a new king of Israel and a 
new king of Syria, who would after a while 
be the instruments of God in dealing with 
the obdurate house of Ahab. Nor was the 
cause of God as weak as the desponder 
thought. There were seven thousand who 
stood upright among the faithless. 

After finding Elisha in obedience to this 
command, Elijah vanished for about six 
years from the public history of Israel ; 
while Ahab, with varying fortunes, was 
prosecuting war against the king of 
Syria. 

But once more, and for the last time, the 
prophet and the king were brought face to 
face. The monarch had shown that he was 
craven-hearted and vacillating in military 
matters as he had been weak and false in 
religion. As a man he further showed him- 
self to be grasping. Hard by his palace in 
Jezreel was a vineyard belonging to a pri- 
vate Israelite. The covetous eye of royalty 



50 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

fell upon it, but its owner would not agree 
either to a sale or an exchange. The king 
moped and became melancholy because he 
could not secure it. The queen came to 
his help. She devised a high-handed and 
iniquitous conspiracy by which, on a charge 
of blasphemy, the owner of the vineyard 
was put to death with his family. The 
property was forfeited to the Crown. Ahab 
with a glad heart took possession. But 
while he was surveying it with the pride 
of recent acquisition in his eye, Elijah con- 
fronted him, by the order of God, and an- 
nounced the disgraceful death of himself, 
his wife and all his family : the dogs of the 
city and the fowl of the air would feed upon 
their flesh. On the spot where Naboth had 
been illegally stoned to death should the 
dogs lick up the blood of Ahab. 

A temporary spasm of remorse agitated 
the frame of the wretched man. But he 
went on to his fate. In two years more he 
was killed in battle. 



THE LIFE. SI 

Ahaziah his son succeeded him, and fol- 
lowed in the footsteps of his father and 
mother in the worship of Baal and its at- 
tendant vices. In the second year of his 
reign, meeting with an accident, he sent to 
inquire of an idol god whether he should 
recover from the effects of it. Again Eli- 
jah crosses the path of the public history. 
Intercepting the messengers, he directed 
them to return to the king with the decla- 
ration that because he had thus contempt- 
uously treated Jehovah he should never 
rise from his bed, but should surely die. 
The sick man, obdurate and indignant, sent 
a band of fifty men to secure the person 
of the prophet. Something in their mien 
or bearing led Elijah to call down fire from 
heaven for their destruction. A second 
band, approaching in the same spirit, met 
with the same reception. With a third 
band, who advanced in a different manner, 
he returned to the king and repeated his 
sentence ; and " so he died, according to 



52 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

the word of the Lord which Elijah had 
spoken." 

About thirteen years — so brief was his 
public ministry — had passed since Elijah 
first stood in the presence of Ahab. His 
immediate work was done. The hour for 
his crowning had arrived. After first mak- 
ing a circuit of the schools of the prophets, 
accompanied by Elisha, he crossed the Jor- 
dan to his native district. He separated the 
waters with a stroke of his mantle, which 
he was in the habit of wrapping together 
as a staff, and walked over on dry ground. 
Then, as the master and his divinely-ap- 
pointed successor moved on in earnest con- 
versation, " nearly at the same spot where 
Moses had vanished from the eyes of his 
countrymen" a chariot of fire and horses of 
fire parted them asunder, and the prophet 
of fire went up by a whirlwind into heaven, 
and Elisha saw him no more. 

Of course it was from this that the Scotch 
poet derived the splendid imagery in which 



THE LIFE. 53 

he described the death of the old Cove- 
nanters upon one of their battle-fields : 

" When the righteous had fallen, and the combat was ended, 
A chariot of fire through the dark cloud descended; 
Its drivers were angels on horses of whiteness, 
And its burning wheels turned on axles of brightness. 

" A seraph unfolded its doors bright and shining, 
All dazzling like gold of the seventh refining; 
And the souls that came forth out of great tribulation 
Have mounted the chariot and steeds of salvation." 

Up above the clouds, above the stars that 
appear to us, above the whole expanse of 
the visible universe, into the place of ex- 
ceeding brightness and glory where God 
has his throne, and where the home of the 
angels is, Elijah passed, soul and body un- 
separated — into the innermost circle of the 
glorified; into blissful communion with Abra- 
ham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and all the heroes 
of the race who had been faithful to their 
God ; into ecstatic converse with the Son of 
God himself, who had been using him as 
one of the mighty instruments of his re- 
demptive work. 



54 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

The young men in the school of the 
prophets sent out fifty men, who searched 
the mountains and the valleys for three 
days to see if they could find his body. 
But in vain : that body, glorified, was en- 
joying the rapture of heaven with Enoch, 
who in the dawn of human history had 
also been translated without seeing death. 
Among all who thus far have left the earth 
Enoch and Elijah diverse from the rest ap- 
pear : 

" Their form 
Is that of men, and yet not mortal men ; 
Their likeness spiritual, yet not spirits alone, 
So pure the texture of that robe they wear, 
The light translucent through transfigured flesh, 
As onyx stone or ruby flashing fire." 

Over nine hundred years passed in the 
enjoyment of that blissful rest, and again 
the prophet appeared upon the earth. 
With Moses he winged his way down to 
meet the Redeemer in the flesh, and on the 
Mount of Transfiguration conversed with 
him about that exodus which was to turn 



THE LIFE. 55 

the death of all the redeemed into a trans- 
lation from earth to heaven. 

Though Elijah then disappeared again 
as suddenly as he had appeared, his min- 
istry ceased not. John the Baptist came in 
the spirit and power of Elias. Wherever 
men are deeply sunken in sin, and need to 
have an overmastering repentance preach- 
ed, the same spirit and power are at work. 
If the expectation of the bodily return of 
the prophet before the second advent of 
the Lord be too literal an interpretation of 
the revealed word, the spirit of the same 
ministry shall introduce the supreme event 
of human history. 

Here is a biography which stands alone 
in the literature of the Church and of the 
world. The time and the place of the 
man's birth unknown ; an eventful, far- 
reaching ministry of thirteen years, during 
which his word " burned like a lamp ;" no 
end to the life, but a whirlwind ascent to 



56 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

the city of our God, the new Jerusalem of 



glory ! 



And what is the one great lesson whose 
glow is over it all ? It is this : 

Be devoted to the true God and to his 
service, whoever else refuses to stand with 
you. Be faithful to him, and he will carry 
you through the struggles of the world ; 
and, though your frame may pass under the 
form of death, your soul will be translated 
to the place of exceeding glory, and at last, 
with reclaimed body, will be ravished by the 
complete joy of redemption. 

Alone ! alone ! Was Elijah really alone ? 
No ; not then, not now. He belonged, and 
belongs, to a glorious company. " Oh, Elias !" 
cries out the writer of one of the apocryphal 
books, " how wast thou honored in thy won- 
drous deeds ! And who may glory like unto 
thee ? . . . Blessed are they that saw thee 
and slept in love ; for we shall surely live." 
Be of their number. Remain not among 
the Baal-worshipers. Live not in the world 



THE LIFE. 57 

of those who refuse to look above nature. 
Mingle not with those who indulge in the 
world's vices. Come out from among them, 
and be ye separate. Follow 7 the Lord for 
whom Elijah was jealous. In that service 
be intensely zealous to the end, and you 
will at last wear a crown of life with Enoch 
and Moses and Elijah, and, more than all, 
with the divine Jesus himself! Tabernacle 
with them now, and with them you will abide 
for evermore. 




II. 




GOD AND NATURE. 

BRUPT and dramatic was the man- 
ner in which Elijah appeared upon 
the sacred page. Without a pre- 
paratory note of warning, he stood in the 
presence of the apostate king and uttered 
a sentence which embodied the essence of 
his mission : " As the Lord God of Israel 
liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not 
be dew nor rain these years, but according 
to my word." i Kings xvii. i. He was the 
servant of the Lord God of Israel ; and by the 
omnipotent One he had been clothed with 
an influence over Nature which was to be 
used for the infliction of judgment upon the 
nation and upon its rulers for their aggra- 
vated sins. 

58 



GOD AND NATURE. 59 

In the preceding chapter I endeavored, in 
a pictorial style, with the aid of side-lights, 
and with references here and there to our 
own condition, to tell the wonderful story of 
this prophet of fire. I gathered, from the dif- 
ferent parts of the word of God in which it 
is contained, the biography of the man and 
his relation to the apostate kingdom of Is- 
rael — a biography which no intelligent per- 
son can read or hear without having the 
heart set on fire. 

It may deepen the impression which the 
longer narrative has made, and will the 
more vividly prepare for the great perma- 
nent lessons for which the biography was 
embalmed in the inspired Book and has 
been preserved for all ages, if I condense 
in a still more compact form the great facts 
of the life. 

Elijah appeared nearly two thousand 
eight hundred years ago, nine hundred 
years before our divine Saviour was born on 
the earth, and about sixty-five years after 



60 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

the Hebrew commonwealth, through the su- 
preme folly of Solomon's son, and as a judg- 
ment for the sins into which the magnificent 
monarch had fallen and led the nation, had 
been divided. 

The separatist kingdom of Israel had 
been plunged into the gulf of one of the 
vilest of religions. An idolatress of the 
worst and most imperious cast was its 
queen. Her infamous religion had been 
forced upon the nation, and persecution 
had been inaugurated to compel the people 
to receive it. 

On account of that, and in answer to his 
inspired prayer, Elijah was sent by God to 
declare to the king that a drought should 
for three and a half years curse the land. 

During that infliction the prophet was 
specially cared for by God ; first, near a 
brook running into the Jordan in the terri- 
tory of the kingdom of Judah, where, day 
by day, he was miraculously fed by ravens ; 
then in a town of the heathen Sidon, in the 



GOD AND NATURE. 6 1 

home of a widow whose scanty supply of 
food was kept from failing, and whose boy 
he called back from the region of death. 

At the end of that period he again ap- 
peared to Ahab the king and had a remark- 
able contest with four hundred and fifty 
priests of the idolatrous religion. They 
failed to bring fire from the sun to burn the 
sacrifice that had been placed on their altar ; 
in response to his prayer Jehovah's light 
ning struck and consumed not only his sac- 
rifice, but the altar itself, and evoked from 
the multitude the thundering shout, "Jeho- 
vah, he is God ! Jehovah, he is God !" 

Having executed judicial vengeance upon 
the false prophets, Elijah announced to the 
king that the drought was at an end ; and 
then the monarch in his chariot and the 
prophet on foot ran from Carmel to Jezreel, 
the royal summer city, under the pelting of a 
great rain, every drop of which w r as better 
than gold to the scorched and cracked soil. 

The bad queen, however, was furious at 



62 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

the truthful but rough man of God. She 
threatened him with death. He fled, weak- 
ly and unhappily, to the Arabian desert and 
to the mount of Moses. For once in his 
life fearful and discouraged, he abandoned 
his post and lost his vantage-ground. 

But God pitied the human weakness 
which was the physical and mental reaction 
of the hard ordeal through which his ser- 
vant had passed. Beneath a juniper tree 
on the way he sent his angel to refresh the 
exhausted man with sleep and to strengthen 
him with food ; and afterward, on the mount, 
made a revelation which showed him that 
the divine cause was not as weak in the na- 
tion as he thought, and that his work should 
not fail in the end, though success was not 
to come in the way and at the time that he 
had expected. 

Then, by divine direction, Elijah anointed 
Elisha as his successor to carry on his work 
after his departure. 

Six years passed with the prophet in re- 



GOD AND NATURE. 63 

tirement. The king and the queen doubt- 
less thought they were free from him. The 
fruits of the Carmel victory remained un- 
gathered. So debased had the leaders of 
the people become that the foreign hea- 
theness was able to use them as instru- 
ments in trumping up a false charge of 
blasphemy against a private citizen, in or- 
der to destroy him and his family, and to 
give to the king the vineyard on which he 
had cast covetous eyes, but which the 
owner had refused either to sell or ex- 
change. This atrocious act of spoliation 
and murder brought the prophet from his 
obscurity into the presence of Ahab, and 
led him to denounce sweeping and disgrace- 
ful deaths against the royal pair and all 
their descendants. 

In two years the judgment fell upon 
Ahab. Following him, his son Ahaziah was 
met by Elijah and told that he also should 
die because he had treated Jehovah with 
despite. 



64 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

Shortly after that, and about thirteen 
years from the day when he had first 
stepped upon the page of the sacred his- 
tory, Elijah was translated to the glory of 
heaven. He did not die. On a whirlwind 
he was borne in triumph to the beautiful 
land. For nine hundred years he enjoyed 
the bliss of immediate communion with the 
redeemed who had gone up, and through 
the ages were going up, from the struggles 
of earth to the bright mansions prepared for 
them. 

He came down in his glorified body to 
earth for a little while on a night which is 
peculiarly glorious in the New Testament. 
On the Mount of Transfiguration, to which 
the blessed Jesus had withdrawn with three 
of his disciples as he was approaching the 
death of the cross, Moses and Elijah ap- 
peared, bringing with them the atmosphere 
of heaven, and encircling the Redeemer in 
its radiance, and holding up his humanity in 
view of its awful trial. 



GOD AND NATURE. 65 

Then Elijah went back to the beatific 
land. He has never since left it; but the 
spirit and power of his life and mission still 
go forth over the earth. It is the type and 
the inspiring principle of every preparatory 
work of repentance through which great tri- 
umphs of Jesus are introduced — the harbin- 
ger of the gospel in its rich redemption. 

Such a story, in the simple telling or read- 
ing, without the form of moralizing upon it, 
should have a most persuasive influence. 

It has been said that "the highest truth 
has been learned, not from a system, but a 
person, the God-man Christ Jesus — ■ 

' When truth in closest words shall fail, 
Then truth embodied in a tale 

Will enter at the lowliest doors ; 
And so the Word had breath, and wrought 

With human hands the creed of creeds 

In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
More strong than all poetic thought.' " * 

* " It is remarkable that Seneca acknowledges the need of a 

moral ideal — a pattern by which we can shape our conduct. He 

advises us to revolve the example of good men and heroes like 

Cato, in order to draw from thern guidance, though he admits 

5 



66 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

Subordinate to that grand and divine life, 
every truly religious one pictured on the 
sacred pages has a similar influence ; and 
none more nobly so than this of Elijah. It 
had its special place in the development of 
the sacred history. Those incidents of it 
which have been preserved by the inspired 
pen were selected because of the lessons 
that they should impress on succeeding 
ages. One series of these lessons is of 
special value in this scientific age, because 

their imperfection and consequent insufficiency for this end. 
Christianity alone supplies this need by presenting human na- 
ture in its purity and perfection in the person of Christ." — Fish- 
er's Beginnings of Christianity, p. 174. 

The various meannesses which Homer attributes to his gods 
have led to the remark (Collins's Homer, p. 38) that " the con- 
ception of gods in human shape has always a tendency to mon- 
strosities and caricature. How close, too, the supernatural and 
the grotesque seem to lie together may be seen even in the exist- 
ing sculptures and carvings of ancient Christendom, and still 
more remarkably in the old miracle-plays, which mix buffoonery 
with the most sacred subjects in a manner which it is hard to 
reconcile with any real feeling of reverence." What an argu- 
ment for Christianity and for the Bible lies in the contrast which 
is presented by the revealed and inspired delineation of the God 
incarnate ! 



GOD AND NATURE. 67 

of its connection with the permanent rela- 
tion of God to the works of his hands. 

(1.) The whole recorded history of Eli- 
jah manifests in a striking manner the con- 
trol which God retains over the forces and 
operations of nature. 

The doctrine which the Bible and true 
science unite in teaching is this: God cre- 
ated the universe in the beginning, and im- 
pressed upon it the laws under which it con- 
tinues to exist and, in its various departments, 
to operate. According to those laws, the 
forces of nature move with that steady uni- 
formity on which all human science is pred- 
icated and all human schemes are devised 
and carried out. But they are not free from 
the divine reins. The one great underlying 
force of the universe is the power of the 
Creator himself, 

" Who, retired 
Behind his own creation, works unseen 
By the impure, and hears his word denied." * 

* Dana, in his Geology ', says (p. 604) : " The method of evolu- 



68 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

He will not lightly make any apparent 
break in the uniform rotation-march of the 
great machine. He will not so act as to de- 
stroy the confidence in the steady sequence 
of events with which he has endowed the 
human mind. Buthe does control all things. 
Nature is ruled in the interests of his great 
moral government, and so regally ruled that 
the bold assertion of a poet is not too sweep- 
ing, that 

" The course of nature is the art of God;" 

Or, as old Chaucer has it, 

" Nature, the vicare of the Almightie Lord." 

He could, in extraordinary ways, influ- 
ence and modify the operations of the 

tion admitted of abrupt transitions between species; but for the 
development of man there was required the special act of a being 
above nature, whose supreme will is the source of natural law." 

And again, in the American Journal of Science and Arts, Oct., 
1876, p. 251: "For the development of man, gifted with high 
reason and will, and thus made a power above nature, there was 
required," as Wallace has urged, a special act of a Being above 
natui-e, whose supreme will is not only the source of natural 
law, but the working force of Nature herself" 



GOD AND NATURE. 69 

laws under which the works of his hands go 
on, as men can do in lower degrees ; or, 
when he created, it was in his power so to 
provide that at the proper time there would 
appear to be extraordinary changes, though 
inwrought in the system from the beginning, 
which would advance his moral government. 
These would constitute miraculous interpo- 
sitions of divine power. For the general ob- 
ject now had in view it matters little which 
of these two ideas of a miracle we adopt. 

In the Bible history there were three pe- 
riods when these demonstrations on the field 
of nature were bright and prominent. 

First, in connection with the deliverance 
of God's chosen people from the bondage 
of Egypt, earth, air and water were all won- 
derfully alive beneath the direct power of 
the Most High, exerted through the poten- 
tial voice and the potential rod of his accred- 
ited ambassadors, Moses and Aaron. 

Fifteen centuries later, when the divine 
Redeemer came to earth to accomplish for 



70 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN, 

men a greater deliverance, he brought down 
to Judea the sceptre with which from the 
heavenly throne he swayed the universe ; 
and the Holy Land was thrilled by the en- 
ergy with which he touched all the forces 
of nature and made them do his saving 
will.* 

Almost midway between those two pe- 
riods, when the land was cursed by the 
darkest and deepest apostasy from the na- 
tional life to which the deliverance through 
Moses had introduced the people, and when 
a startling ministry of preparation for the 
greater deliverance by Jesus was needed, in 
the days of Elijah and Elisha the earth also 

* " It is high time that oracular assertions of the impossibility 
of such exertions of power as the New Testament attributes to 
Christ, or of the impossibility of proving them under any circum- 
stances, should be set aside. It is impertinent, on the ground of 
some metaphysical scheme — an a priori conception of the uni- 
verse — to set these arbitrary limits to the power of spirit over 
nature. If a system of philosophy cannot find room for facts 
well attested by historical evidence, so much the worse for the 
philosophical system." — Fisher's Beginnings of Christianity, p. 
462. 



GOD AND NATURE. 7 1 

shook and the heavens glowed under the 
touches of God, which proved that nature 
was not a blind and inexorable deity, work- 
ing on with unvarying tread, but that all her 
forces are under his immediate control. 

Now, it is most significant that every act 
of Elijah which has been preserved in the 
inspired record is an exhibition of this rela- 
tion in which God stands to his works. Of 
no one else, not even of Jesus, can this be 
said. Observe the facts : 

Rain was withheld for three and a half 
years, and then fell upon the land according 
to the prophet's word. Most unnatural! 
Against the ordinary condition of the at- 
mosphere ! What would have come upon 
our modern observer if he had been on his 
watch-tower during those distressingly bright 
forty-two months ? How monotonous and 
dreary would have been his report from day 
to day ! " Higher barometer ! Clear, dry, 
scorching weather ! No change ! What 
does it mean ?" But God revealed to Elijah 



72 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

in advance the persistent dryness of the air, 
and then made known to him the day when 
clouds would appear and rain descend ; and 
on the top of Carmel, while the sky contin- 
ued to wear its brazen face, his boy kept 
looking, with the eye of faith in the proph- 
et, and saw the first indication of the storm 
in the little cloud no bigger than a man's 
hand. 

Irrational creatures were guided by the 
Lord in a strange manner to do his work 
of mercy. Ravens, influenced by him against 
the peculiarities of their nature, brought 
bread and flesh to the holy man day by 
day. 

A woman in a heathen land, moved 
by a gracious influence upon her mind, 
against her natural promptings and with 
the failure of her scanty supply threaten- 
ing her, took the prophet into her house 
and shared with him the little food which 
she had for herself and her boy ; and as 
she did that, day by day and week by week 



GOD AND NATURE. 73 

for three years, the pitcher * and the cruse, 
against the course of nature, never became 
empty, but were kept supplied with meal 
and oil in a mysterious manner; and the 
boy, too, though he had died, was brought 
back to life in answer to the prophet's 
prayer. 

On Mount Carmel preternatural fire, on 
the petition of Elijah, descended and con- 
sumed the burnt sacrifice and the wood and 
the stones and the dust, and licked up the 
water that was in the trench. 

As he slept beneath the juniper tree an 
angel touched and awoke him, and he be- 
held a cake, on hot stones, made by no hu- 
man baker, and a cruse of water placed at 
his head by no human agency ; and, after a 
second sleep, he rose and ate and drank 
again, and then, in the strength of that 
bread and water, traveled for forty days. 

On Mount Horeb a storm of wind, an 

* The "barrel" of I Kings xvii. 12 is elsewhere translated 
"pitcher"' — that is, an earthen jar. 



74 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

earthquake, and a fire, that wrapped the bar- 
ren, rocky region in flames, passed in quick 
succession before him — phenomena which, 
if at other times witnessed there in various 
degrees, yet brought about at that time and 
accompanied by the still small voice, showed 
that the Lord was passing by and sending 
them before him. 

After the spoliation and murder of Na- 
both by Jezebel and Ahab the prophet de- 
nounced on the royal house strange and un- 
looked-for judgments, which exactly came 
upon them by remarkable combinations of 
natural events. 

Because he was a man of God the fire 
came down from heaven upon two success- 
ive companies of soldiers who had been sent 
to capture him by violence. 

The close of his earthly life was a sus- 
pension and overthrow of the great event 
which, under sin, comes to all, and which, 
certain scientists would make us believe, is 
a necessary step in the very evolution of 



GOD AND NATURE. 75 

matter and of life ; for, against the law of 
gravity, he was borne aloft from the world, 
and, against the law of death, he lived and 
lives on for ever. 

In all this there is thrown across the 
sacred page and out before the world a 
most splendid bracelet of history, every 
link of which is a miracle - diamond of 
the first water. The acts are facts of au- 
thentic history. They have in their support 
all the evidence, historical and moral, which 
sustains the Scripture as a revelation and 
an inspiration. We have far more certain 
proof for the truth of them than we have 
for the hypotheses which lie at the foun- 
dation of modern systems of knowledge. 
They are a stirring protest against what 
has been called the " dirt philosophy/' 
w T hich the teachers of an unscriptural and 
an irrational science inculcate, and which 
would make nature its own lord and mas- 
ter, without an overruling and all-pervading 
moral Being from whom it came. And they 



76 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

remind us that the God who then broke 
through his ordinary modes of procedure, 
and let his hand be seen and his voice be 
heard in those extraordinary dealings, still 
directs the forces of the universe as the ex- 
pressions of his own will. "Nature is alive 
with a life received from God himself and 
mysteriously connected with him. ,, * 

(2.) A second truth that is most power- 
fully illustrated in this portion of the sacred 
history is, that God employs the forces of 
nature as agents for the punishment and 
chastisement of individuals and nations. 

Drought and famine came upon Israel 
because of the sin against Jehovah into 
which Ahab had fallen and led the peo- 
ple. 

Ahab went into a battle disguised, so that 
the soldiers of the Syrian king, who had 
given orders that his death alone should 
be striven after, could not recognize him ; 

* Shairp's Poetic Interpretation of Nature, p. 221. 



GOD AND NATURE. 7J 

but an " arrow shot at a venture " laid him 
low ; and, carried back dead to Samaria, his 
blood was washed from his chariot in a par- 
ticular place and licked up by the dogs of 
the city, because he had acted infamously 
toward a private Israelite ; and the prophet 
had declared that exactly that death should 
meet him on account of that sin. 

Ahaziah's accident and sickness termina- 
ted fatally because he had followed in the 
footsteps of his father and had contemned 
Jehovah. 

Thus the power of the sun, by which the 
vapor is drawn from the seas and rivers 
and condensed into overshadowing clouds 
for rain ; the course of an arrow from the 
bow of an unknown soldier and the instinct 
of irrational dogs; the effects of a fall and the 
working of a disease in the human body, — 
were controlled and directed by God for the 
infliction of his just judgments. 

The Bible, from the beginning to the end, 
is full of proofs that the physical and the 



78 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

moral governments of God are intermingled 
and act and react upon each other. 

As in man the soul affects the body and 
the body the soul, each suffering for the 
misdeeds or blest by the righteousness of 
the other ; as the vices that weaken and 
undermine the body enervate the soul, 
which through the body influences and is 
influenced by the external world, while 
whatever strengthens the physical system 
has a tendency to clarify and give health 
to the mind ; as the soul, educated and 
purified in holy habits, writes itself upon 
the face and with energy sweeps through 
the bodily frame : — so, in the wider sphere 
of the world and the universe, the sins of 
God's rational creatures jar the forces and 
operations of matter and react with suffer- 
ing on the sinners ; and holiness, to the ex- 
tent to which it prevails, harmonizes and 
subdues and beneficently sways the mech- 
anism of nature. God has established a 
connection between the two, and, whether 



GOD AND NATURE. 79 

by a pre-established harmony, or by his di- 
rect touches consistently with the laws which 
he impressed in the beginning, he deals with 
the one on account of the other. 

Every period of great moral and religious 
excitement in the history of the world has 
exhibited this. The striking agitations and 
derangements and convulsions of nature 
with which prophecy surrounds the second 
coming of the Redeemer are pre-eminently 
suggestive of it. 

All the forces of the universe are in God's 
hand, and he controls them as his agents to 
execute his judicial purposes. Even men 
can in a degree restrain and direct them. 
Much more can the almighty Creator and 
Judge. 

As " we have, to a certain extent and in 
a certain way, power to suspend or coun- 
teract in individual cases the operation of a 
law of nature," so, and in a still higher and 
more sweeping degree, " by his intelligence 
and will God can bring into play a new cause 



80 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

which can suspend or counteract in a partic- 
ular instance the usual working of a law of 
nature. That book, for example, would lie 
for ever where it is if no interference with 
the law of gravitation were possible ; but 
I will to lift it, and the new cause, acting 
through my muscles upon the book, raises 
it notwithstanding gravitation. In the will of 
man, therefore, as operating first upon his 
own muscular nature, and second, through 
that upon external things, we have, in a cer- 
tain sense and to a certain extent, a super- 
natural cause. But if the intelligence and 
will of man are equal to such interference 
with nature and nature's laws, can we deny 
to God a similar power? Or is it conceiv- 
able that he has formed in the universe a 
vast machine, and that he has deliberately 
shut himself out from all possibility of inter- 
fering with it for any purpose whatever, no 
matter how important ? * 

He did so judicially intervene in the 

* Presbyterian Quarterly, vi. (new series), pp. 613, 614. 



GOD AND NATURE. 8 1 

times of Elijah ; and what he did then he 
does still. Let his direct touch be where it 
may, rain and drought, abundance and fam- 
ine, health and sickness, storms and calms, 
commercial prosperity and commercial de- 
rangement and ruin, are not arbitrary events. 
They come under his providence ; they are 
used as his judgments ; his force directs 
them. 

Our blessed Lord, however, in two of his 
utterances in the New Testament, guards 
against a rash construction of this fact, as a 
noted example in the Old Testament had 
also done. They both show that it is not 
safe for a finite mind dogmatically to make 
the application of this great law to particular 
cases, and upon it express a judgment as to 
the relative moral character of sufferers. 

During the life of Jesus a tower was stand- 
ing or going up in the city of Jerusalem near 
to the pool of Siloam. There were unskill- 
ful workmen then as there are now ; bad 
builders ; scaling contractors who would give 



82 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

the worst materials and the poorest work- 
manship for the greatest amount of the pub- 
lic money ; peculators who would do public 
works and use the public funds in a way in 
which they would not employ their private 
means or their private buildings. And one 
day that tower fell and buried eighteen men 
in its ruins. A sudden judgment ! Perhaps 
the careless master-builder was among the 
number, and deserved his fate. " But," cried 
out Jesus, "think ye that those eighteen were 
sinners above all the men that dwelt in Jeru- 
salem ? I tell you, nay ; but except ye re- 
pent ye shall all likewise perish. " 

That remark followed another which the 
Lord had uttered in censure upon some 
busybodies of the day. The Jews were 
then in a very inflammable condition, and 
tumults among them were frequent. In a 
riotous disturbance that had taken place 
the troops of Pilate, the Roman governor, 
had massacred some Galileans while they 
were engaged in the temple-worship, and 



GOD AND NATURE. 83 

had mingled their blood with the blood of 
their sacrifices. Certain scandal-mongers 
came to the Master with the news, evi- 
dently supposing that particular crimes had 
brought upon the " slaughtered worshipers 
so hideous and tragical a fate." But the 
Divine One, sweeping aside their unchar- 
itable judgment, declared: "Suppose ye 
that these Galileans were sinners above all 
the Galileans because they suffered such 
things ? I tell you, nay ; but except ye 
repent, ye shall all likewise perish. ,, 

With a heavy hand the Almighty had, 
long before that, come down on the three 
friends of Job because they attributed the 
severe chastisements, with which he had 
been visited, to secret, unknown, hypocrit- 
ical sins. 

The texture of society is so intricate, the 
various classes are so mixed together in this 
world, that the innocent are often involved 
with the guilty in the natural fruits of their 
deeds and in the judgments of God upon 



84 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

them. Hence, while it is prudent and wise 
for each to ask himself, when any trouble 
befalls him, Is this, may it be, for the cor- 
rection of any errors of mine? — as the wo- 
man of Sarepta, when her boy died, called 
to mind her sinfulness of life — yet it is a 
usurpation of the exclusive right of the di- 
vine Judge for any mortal to pass such a 
judgment upon other sufferers. 

In regard to nations there may be a 
greater sweep of human opinion. As a 
moral governor, God deals with them as 
well as with individuals. His sentences 
upon them take a longer time to work 
themselves out ; but they are visited in 
their full extent in this world. In that re- 
spect nations differ from individuals, who 
pass into the future and meet the most 
tremendous part of their sentence there. 
But, in national inflictions especially, in- 
nocent individuals are swept along in the 
woes that are brought down by the guilty. 
Elijah himself, and the seven thousand who 



GOD AND NATURE. 85 

had never bowed the knee to Baal, suffered 
from the drought and famine which the sin 
of Ahab and of the mass of the nation drew 
upon the land. 

Even in this, however, lies the germ of a 
practical thought for our guidance. No man 
liveth unto himself and no man dieth unto 
himself. We each influence and are influ- 
enced by others. A nation is made up of 
its individual members. Every one has 
something to do with shaping its character 
and course. Hence, as God deals with it 
for its general administration and for the 
sins which prevail, and as those who are 
exalted to office do so much to regulate 
that administration and to exalt or debase 
the public life, it is the duty of every one 
by influence and act to seek to purify both 
the people and their representative rulers. 
But it has largely come to pass in our cit- 
ies and towns — though not to so great a 
degree in the rural regions — that the mass 
of the respectable, honest, conscientious men 



86 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

do not trouble themselves with the manage- 
ment of public affairs. They generally per- 
mit the primary elections of the parties to 
be held in places where no man of any self- 
respect can go. Those primary meetings 
practically settle the nominations in larger 
conventions. As a stream can rise no higher 
than its fountain, the nominees of such men 
cannot in general be expected to be better 
than themselves. Hence we have too of- 
ten presented for office candidates between 
whom it is hard to choose. They make bad 
laws. They start extravagant enterprises in 
which robbery of the public money is prac- 
ticed under politer names. They set bad 
examples, especially to the rising genera- 
tion. They fearfully increase taxes. Then 
the respectable men who have not touched 
politics grow angry, and complain of their 
burdens and of the low class of public offi- 
cials. But they suffer, and the poor suffer, 
and God is displeased with the immoralities 
which are practiced by public men and, un- 



GOD AND NATURE. 87 

der them, by the nation. Yet it is because 
the better classes attend exclusively to their 
private affairs, without remembering that they 
owe a duty to the public, to the state, to 
God. It is because they will tolerate in pub- 
lic matters a standard of morality which they 
would scorn to recognize and act upon in pri- 
vate affairs. It is because they do not insist 
that everywhere and at all times — in private 
business, in the management of fiduciary 
trusts and in civil government — the inflex- 
ible moral law of God shall be binding. That 
is largely the source of our troubles. We 
forget that a nation is a moral organism. 

The last interview of Elijah with Ahab, in 
which the prophet foretold to the king his 
violent death and the disgraceful end of his 
whole family, was caused by the monarch's 
sin in making a false charge against Naboth, 
and thereby securing his murder, so as to 
get possession of his vineyard. On this 
Dean Stanley says : " It is the characteris- 



88 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

tic of the sacred history that the final doom 
of the dynasty of Omri should be called 
forth not by its idolatry, not by its perse- 
cution of the prophets, but by an act of in- 
justice to an individual, a private citizen." 
This is too sweeping a remark. It needs 
qualification. For that act was the culmi- 
nation of Ahab's long course of departure 
from the worship of the true God and of re- 
sistance to the divinely-sent prophets — the 
practical working out, in every-day life and 
in business-matters, of his violation of the 
theocratic law of the kingdom. It was the 
occasion, and one of the acts, which led to 
the passing of the death-sentence. But it 
is significant of the sanction which the re- 
vealed law throws around individual rights, 
of the jealous eye with which God looks at 
the dealings of rulers with the men whom 
they rule, of the care which he takes of 
those who cannot take care of themselves, 
and of the sternness with which he will visit 
the high and the powerful who dare to be 



GOD AND NATURE. 89 

arbitrary and unjust, — it is significant of all 
this that on such a sin as that the divine 
sentence was uttered. Those who despoil 
the widow and the orphan ; those who grind 
the poor as between the upper and the neth- 
er millstone ; those who make or administer 
laws in such a way that struggling men and 
women lose their homes and their means 
through their misfortune, not their fault; 
those who bring about a state of things 
which sell the houses from over the heads 
of the hardworking and the saving, — they 
may prosper for years, multiplying their gains, 
adding to their property, increasing their pow- 
er. It may be difficult to track their move- 
ments ; it may be impossible for human eyes 
to see where the fraud was practiced, and for 
human judgment to declare where the great- 
est guilt lies; but the God of heaven knows, 
and, as sure as he is just, judgment will be 
entailed upon the transgressors. 

(3.) A third lesson, most powerfully ex- 



90 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

hibited in the story of Elijah, is that the 
sufferings which God inflicts through na- 
ture have in themselves no reclaiming 
power. 

The three and a half years of drought and 
famine did not turn the Israelites — much less 
Ahab and Jezebel — from the worship of Baal. 
The judgment of fire upon the altar on Car- 
mel and the destruction of the four hundred 
and fifty priests appeared to sweep the mul- 
titude into a renewed acknowledgment of 
Jehovah ; but it was only a momentary en- 
thusiasm, and Jezebel was hardened by the 
visitation. The passing of the sentence of 
death upon Ahab for his sin against Naboth 
made him rend his clothes and put sackcloth 
upon his flesh and fast and walk softly for a 
little while, so that he secured a temporary 
postponement of the full execution of the 
sentence ; but, like a compressed spring, he 
quickly jumped up into his sinful course 
again, and went to his disgraceful death 
upon the battlefield. His death, and his 



GOD AND NATURE. 9 1 

son's death, and the knowledge of all that 
was denounced against the queen-wife and 
mother, did not soften her heart. She con- 
tinued in her way, and, for years after Eli- 
jah's translation, went on in her God-defy- 
ing, man-despising course, until, with her 
painted face and her tired head, she was 
thrown from the window of her palace in 
Jezreel, trampled under foot by Jehu's 
horse, her blood sprinkled on the wall and 
her carcass eaten by the dogs — as Elijah, 
seventeen years before, in Naboth's field, 
had predicted should come to pass. 

Strange, was it not? in spite of all the 
plain denunciations from God, enforced as 
they were by one judgment after another, 
that through them Ahab for twelve years 
and Jezebel for twenty-nine years from Eli- 
jah's first appearance, persisted in their sin- 
ful rebellion and immorality, and that the 
people submitted to their tyranny and con- 
tinued in their sin ! 

No, it was not strange. It was the legit- 



92 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN, 

imate working of simple human nature un- 
influenced by the restraining and saving 
influence of the Holy Spirit. 

In one of the paragraphs of his article 
on Lord Byron, Macaulay has — uninten- 
tionally, perhaps, but most powerfully — 
described the searing influence of afflic- 
tions in themselves. With great genius 
and much to build him up, Byron lived 
from the first in an atmosphere loaded 
with pains and aggravations in body and 
in mind; and under their influence, "year 
after year and month after month, he con- 
tinued to repeat that to be wretched is the 
destiny of all ; that to be eminently wretch- 
ed is the destiny of the eminent; that all 
the desires by which we are cursed lead 
alike to misery ; if they are not gratified, 
to the misery of disappointment ; if they 
are gratified, to the misery of satiety. His 
heroes are men who have arrived by differ- 
ent roads at the same goal of despair, who 
are sick of life, who are at war with society, 



GOD AND NATURE. 93 

who are supported in their anguish only by 
an unconquerable pride resembling that of 
Prometheus on the rock or of Satan in the 
burning marl; who can master their agonies 
by the force of their will ; and who to the 
last defy the whole power of earth and 
heaven. He always described himself as 
a man of the same kind with his favored 
creatures — as a man whose heart had been 
withered, whose capacity for happiness was 
gone and could not be restored, but whose 
invincible spirit dared the worst that could 
befall him here or hereafter." 

That was — that is — hell. And it is a state 
which does not burn out or purify itself. 
Once beyond the grace of God — which is 
withdrawn from the unsaved at death — it 
is unending. 

The inefificacy of wrathful judgments to 
save was one great lesson which was taught 
by God's manifestation of himself to Eli- 
jah on Horeb. The prophet was disheart- 
ened because the result of the trial on Car- 



94 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

mel had not converted Jezebel, or at least 
rallied the people to his support against 
her ; but that, on the contrary, upon the very 
day when it took place, and while the land 
was rejoicing in the rain which had come 
according to his word, she threatened him 
with death, and the people failed him and 
left him alone. His nature was of the vin- 
dicatory,* judicial, stern cast, jealous for 
God and his law ; though he was not want- 
ing in tenderness. But Jehovah showed him 
that the real power for the good of men, his 
effectual influence for their salvation, was not 
in the earthquake, the wind, the fire, which 
blast and destroy the face of nature, but in 
the gentle influence which enters the heart 
and sweetly constrains it to follow him. 
The other — the severe — dealings of his 
judgment and wrath may startle, attract 
attention, produce fear for a time : to save, 
the still small voice must follow them. 

* Not "vindictive;" there is a difference in the meaning of 
the two words. 



GOD AND NATURE. 95 

The ministry of Elijah seems to be made 
prominent in the sacred history, especially 
in contrast with that of Elisha, his succes- 
sor, and still more in contrast with that of 
Jesus, to burn this lesson into the mind and 
heart of the Church of God. " Not in his 
own mission, grand and gigantic as it was, 
would after ages so clearly discern the di- 
vine inspiration as in the still small voice 
of justice that breathed through the wri- 
tings of the later prophets, for w T hom he 
only prepared the way — Hosea, Amos, Mi- 
cah, Isaiah, Jeremiah. Not in the vengeance 
which through Hazael and Jehu was to 
sweep away the house of Omri, so much 
as in the discerning love which was to 
spare the seven thousand ; not in the 
strong east wind that parted the Red Sea, 
or the fire that swept the top of Sinai, or 
the earthquake that shook down the walls 
of Jericho, would God be brought so near 
to man as in the ministrations of Him whose 
cry was not heard in the streets ; in the aw- 



96 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

ful stillness of the cross ; in the never-fail- 
ing order of providence ; in the silent, in- 
sensible influence of good deeds and good 
words, of God and of man. This is the pre- 
dictive element of Elijah's prophecies. This 
is the sign that the history of the Church 
had made a vast stride since the days of 
Moses. Here we see in an irresistible form 
the true unity of the Bible. The sacred nar- 
rative rises above itself to a world hidden as 
yet from the view of those to whom the vis- 
ion was revealed. There is already a Gos- 
pel of Elijah." * 

* Stanley's History of the Jewish Church, ii., pp. 343, 344. 

The dean is not so admirable when he adds : " He, the far- 
thest removed of all the prophets from the evangelical spirit and 
character, has yet enshrined in the heart of his story the most for- 
cible of all protests against the hardness of Judaism, the noblest 
anticipation of the breadth and depth of Christianity." A great 
many errors of the so-called liberal and broad Church writers of 
the day, and of the more pronounced rejecters of the Old Testa- 
ment, would be avoided if they were to discriminate carefully be- 
tween Judaism as revealed by God and as perverted, distorted, 
imperfectly exhibited, by those who professed it; between the 
pure revelation itself and its corruptions among the men who had 
it; between the truths really taught by Moses and the prophets on 



GOD AND NATURE. 97 

One incident in the earthly life of our 
blessed Redeemer very vividly brings out 
the contrast between his mission and that 
of the prophet. The people of a certain 
Samaritan village denied him their hospi- 
tality because he was going up to Jerusa- 
lem. James and John thereupon said to him, 
" Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to 
come down from heaven and consume them, 
even as Elias did? But he turned and re- 
buked them and said, Ye know not what 
manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of 
man is not come to destroy men's lives, but 
to save them." Luke ix. 53-56. 

The judicial acts of wrath which Elijah 

the one hand, and the traditions of the elders and the narrowing 
conduct of the later Jews generally on the other. So, too, when 
Stanley, speaking of the Horeb scene, says (p. 340), "It was a 
marked crisis not only in his own life, but in the history of the 
whole prophetic dispensation," we can go with him. But the 
Scriptures do not justify his assertion that " it was, if not the 
first prophetic call to Elijah, the first prophetic manifestation to 
him of the divine Will and the divine Nature." Such a mani- 
festation the Tishbite certainly had in the very first incident of 
his life that is made known to us. 
7 



98 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

wrought were not wrong. They were re- 
quired by the condition of the nation and 
the age. They had their place in the devel- 
opment of God's moral government. Other- 
wise Elijah would not have been honored by 
God as he was. 

But the Redeemer's life and mission, for 
which the fiery Elijah and Elijah's antitype 
prepared the way, were of a different cast. 
He did no work of death to men. None 
of his miracles, except that of the blasting 
of the fig tree, were acts of destruction. 
Kindness, beneficence, mercy, clothed them 
all. He went about doing good. Along 
the highways and the byways, through the 
streets and into the homes of Judea, he 
scattered blessings with the profusion of 
an almighty Monarch. And the prevalent 
tone of his ministry was found in the win- 
ning words and the persuasive invitations 
with which he sought to bring the weary 
and heavy-laden to himself: "I am come to 
seek and save the lost." 



GOD AND NATURE. 99 

None of his followers are now authorized 
to call down fire, to use force, to compel 
men to receive him ; nor may they deal 
harshly with those who refuse to yield to 
his sceptre. They who have done this knew 
not what manner of spirit they were of. His 
ministry was kindness : by kindness alone 
may his followers seek to overcome his en- 
emies and rejecters. 

With this, as glowing in the brighter re- 
lief and in richer tints of loveliness and ma^- 
nificence, because of the contrast with the 
storms, the earthquakes, the fires of Elijah's 
ministry, I close the exhibition of this series 
of lessons. 

The loving ministry of Jesus on earth, 
and, following that, the still, small, but pow- 
erful, ministry of the Spirit in the soul ; the 
pure and perfect life of the God-man which 
quietly marked the way to heaven ; the sac- 
rificial death which closed the road to perdi- 
tion and opened the celestial gates ; the ten- 
der power which did not break the bruised 



IOO ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

reed nor quench the smoking flax ; the di- 
vine voice that roars not through a storm- 
cloud, and strikes not in the lightning, and 
speaks not in violence, but which steals into 
the heart and enlightens the conscience and 
binds the soul as with the cords of a man ; 
the gospel of the atoning Son of God who 
came into the world not to condemn the 
world, but that the world through him might 
be saved, — this is the redeeming and regen- 
erating power that bends from the throne 
of heaven to earth, and draws the saved 
world up within the charmed circle of the 
rainbow which in reflected brightness sur- 
rounds the Most High. 

Behold it with admiration and w T ith grat- 
itude ! Behold the Lamb of God which 
taketh away the sin of the world. The 
Lamb, meek, quiet, suffering, sacrificial! Not 
smiting, but dying ; not calling down fire 
from heaven, but baring his own bosom to 
the storm-cloud; not compelling, but win- 
ning ; not taking our life, but giving his own ! 



GOD AND NATURE. IOI 

Behold the richness and the glory of his 
redemption : from hell and from sin ; in time 
and for eternity. 

Behold the love-scene and the love-gift; 
and, as you behold, submit to its almighty 
influence, and, floating upon it, move on 
heavenward. 

11 Herein is love ; not that we loved God, 
but that he loved us and sent his Son to die 
for us." 




o 

1 4r 


o .= 








ppysis 






III. 

GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. 

HE conflict of fire on Mount Car- 

mel between Elijah the prophet of 

Jehovah and the four hundred and 

fifty prophets of Baal excited the Israelitish 

multitude to a clamorous recognition of the 

covenant God of their nation, and led them, 

under Elijah's lead, to inflict deserved death 

upon the foreign and treasonous idolaters. 

It was immediately followed, too, in response 

to Elijah's prayer and in accordance with his 

assertion, by a great rain which broke the 

three and a half years' drought. The two 

events combined — the judgment and the 

mercy — may have touched the heart of 

King Ahab. 
102 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. IO3 

But Queen Jezebel had not been on the 
mount when the fire of God descended 
upon it. She came not under the influ- 
ence of an immediate contact with the 
wonder. Like a modern scientific skeptic, 
she could explain the happening of the rain 
by purely natural laws, and could account 
for the prophet's promise of it by saying 
that he had detected changes in the atmo- 
sphere which gave a premonition of it, and 
he just happened to tell the time when it 
was to come. Therefore, when Ahab, drip- 
ping wet and agitated by the news which he 
had of the astonishing spiritual duel and of 
the execution of the four hundred and fifty 
priests, reached the palace in Jezreel, an an- 
gry passion inflamed her. Her stony mind 
was not melted by the fire of God. Her dry, 
arid, baked heart was not softened by the 
copious rain which was such a blessing to 
the land. She thought more of the terrific 
blow that her false religion had received 
than of the apparent return of the true 



104 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

God to his people. Unsubdued by the 
suffering through which the nation had 
passed, unconvinced by the manner in 
which Jehovah had spoken from heaven, 
fiercely mad toward the man whom the 
Most High had used as his messenger of 
wrath and of mercy, she sent to Elijah the 
message : " So let the gods do to me, and 
more also, if I make not thy life as the life 
of one of them by to-morrow about this 
time." 

It is not likely that, while the people were 
excited and enthusiastic over the day's oc- 
currence, she could have carried out that 
threat. 

It may be that she hoped the report of 
her declaration would frighten Elijah and 
lead him to fly, and so put in peril the fruits 
of his victory. 

More probably the threat was the hasty 
utterance of an angry woman carried away 
by her passion, and having as yet no def- 
inite idea of what she could do or intended 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. I05 

to do, or of the effect which her message 
would have. 

But it did frighten the bold prophet; and 
that very night, without stopping to see 
whether the queen would attempt to carry 
her threat into effect, or whether the peo- 
ple would not stand between him and her, 
he arose and went for his life. 

Accompanied by no one but his servant, 
he hastened from the dominions of Ahab to 
Beersheba in Judah. But not there did he 
feel himself to be safe, for the king of Ju- 
dah was married to a daughter of Ahab and 
Jezebel. Therefore, leaving his servant, he 
hastened on alone a day's journey into the 
wilderness, and took his first rest beneath a 
juniper or broom tree. And there he sat 
down with only one desire — that he might 
be permitted to die. 

" It is enough ; now, O Lord, take away 
my life : for I am not better than my fa- 
thers." 

Behold the unsuccessful, discouraged, bro- 



106 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN, 

ken-hearted man, tired of life, asking for 
death as a blessing ! 

Can it be ? Is this the bold prophet who, 
three and a half years before, faced the des- 
potic king in his palace and told him that for 
his sins and the sins of the people the land 
was to be cursed? Is this the intercessor 
with God whose prayer had opened and 
closed heaven, withheld and brought rain ? 
Is this the outspoken preacher who not 
many hours before had said to the king, 
when he tried to overawe him, "Thou art 
the troubler of Israel " ? Is this Jehovah's 
unfaltering worshiper who had the faith and 
the courage to challenge the whole host of 
Baal-worshipers to the deciding contest on 
Carmel ? Is this the same man ? Yes, the 
same. " The strong man, weak as a child, 
bent under the burden of unspeakable mis- 
ery. Like some great eagle who has soared 
aloft on sublime wings, but when nearest the 
sun, smitten by a secret shaft, falls like a 
thunderbolt, and we gaze sadly on the clear 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. 107 

eye dimmed over with the dust of earth, and 
on the confused wreck of mighty pinions, 
so deep is the fall, so low the strength, of 
him who had triumphed on Carmel. ,, 

What had produced this transformation ? 
How are this weakness and this apparent 
want of faith to be accounted for? 

The change and lapse are not to be won- 
dered at. Elijah was a man of like pas- 
sions with ourselves. A knowledge of the 
human nature which we all wear explains 
his condition under the juniper tree. 

Some think that he had been carried into 
the execution of the four hundred and fifty 
priests of Baal by an excess of zeal, and 
that, not having had the authority of God 
for the act, his conscience condemned him, 
and produced first the fear which caused 
him to run from Jezebel, and then the de- 
pression of spirits which made him feel that 
his mission was a failure and that death 
would be preferable to life. He was con- 
science-smitten, and therefore weak. 



108 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

This view I do not entertain for one mo- 
ment. 

Others think that the prophet was disap- 
pointed because the people did not rally to 
his support against the queen ; that he had 
been exulting too much in his work, and was 
thus left to himself that he might be hum- 
bled ; and that this was brought about by a 
natural reaction in his physical system which 
left him mentally prostrated. 

The last idea of this statement contains, 
I think, a full explanation. Elijah did not 
wait to see whether the people would stand 
up for him and for God against the foreign 
queen. I cannot perceive in his response 
to the Lord on Mount Horeb any tone of 
undue egotism. Carried away by a sudden 
panic on the very night of his triumph, as 
soon as he heard of the threat of Jezebel, he 
fled from Jezreel ; and his fear was followed 
by deep despondency of spirit, despair, sense 
of utter failure in his mission ; and both the 
fear and the despondency dragged him down 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. IO9 

because his physical system had been pros- 
trated by what he had passed through. 

" Morbid melancholy generally succeeds 
morbid excitement/' The mutual influence 
of the mind and the body upon each other 
is such that a protracted and undue tension 
of either unstrings the other. A diseased 
or exhausted physical system is sure to tell 
upon mental exercises. Nervous prostra- 
tion will bring with it spiritual dullness. 

Now look at what Elijah had suffered. 
For three years he had been in a foreign 
land, living from hand to mouth on short al- 
lowance. That was immediately followed by 
the tremendous conflict of Mount Carmel 
through that long day on which the priests 
of Baal were vainly calling for fire to con- 
sume their sacrifice, and at the close of 
which Elijah poured out the energy of his 
soul in his petition to Jehovah. Then the 
season of suffering banishment and the day 
of exhausting struggle were closed by his 
run of ten or twelve miles from Carmel to 



IIO ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

Jezreel beside the royal chariot, he keeping 
up with it, too, until the city was reach- 
ed. All that was enough to weaken the 
man bodily. His mental agitation must 
have shed over his physical nature an ex- 
citing glow which could not but lead to a re- 
action. The threat of Jezebel found him a 
tired -out man. Looking through the ex- 
hausted body upon the external world, the 
mind could not see things in their normal 
light. The strong man was broken down 
into the feebleness of a child. His intellect 
was gloomily clouded. His feelings were 
depressed. 

The history of the Church and of the 
w r orld is full of similar cases. Many a 
strong man, after excessive toil and anx- 
iety and emotional excitement, has been 
found mentally more helpless than a babe, 
and spiritually shrouded with the blackest 
despair. Many a hero after a great tri- 
umph in which others thought he was in 
every way successful, has, in the retirement 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. Ill 

of his own home, been bemoaning his fail- 
ure. Even the Redeemer was prophetically 
represented as saying, " I have labored in 
vain, I have spent my strength for naught 
and in vain," though his divine power en- 
abled him immediately to add: "Surely my 
judgment is with the Lord, and my w r ork 
[or my reward] with my God." Isa. xlix. 4. 
Elijah, then, under the juniper tree is a 
physically exhausted man ; and his depress- 
ed condition of body has thrown a darkness 
over his mind and made him feel so discour- 
aged that he would rather die than live. He 
was far more excusable than was Moses 
when he offered a similar prayer : " If thou 
deal thus with me, kill me, I pray thee, out 
of hand, if I have found favor in thy sight, 
and let me not see my wretchedness ;" or 
than Jonah, who, displeased and angry be- 
cause God announced his mercy toward Nin- 
eveh, cried out: " Therefore now, O Lord, 
take, I beseech thee, my life from me, for 
it is better for me to die than to live." 



112 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

It is very interesting to observe how the 
divine Physician dealt with the prophet when 
he was found in that weak state. 

First of all he strengthened his body by 
subduing him into sleep and nourishing him 
with food. " So he giveth his beloved 
sleep " — " tired nature's sweet restorer, 
balmy sleep." Thus the physical and men- 
tal excitement of the man was calmed, and 
new fuel was given to the furnace which 
keeps up the life of the body. 

Then he took him away to one of the 
grandest and wildest scenes of nature, and 
there by a remarkable manifestation taught 
him that the kind of work which he had 
been commissioned to perform was a start- 
ling and preparatory one, and that he must 
not expect to accomplish everything and 
at once. His mission was largely punitive, 
but all that it could do was to awaken, to 
startle, to make anxious ; following that, a 
still, gentle influence of the Spirit must do 
the really saving work. 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. I 1 3 

It is not to be overlooked that in connec- 
tion with this special and revealing power 
of God there was a natural influence exert- 
ed upon the mind of the prophet. Direct 
contact with nature is a great means of in- 
struction and of strength for the mind. It 
is good for everybody occasionally to get 
away from bricks and mortar, from crowded 
streets and active work, even from rural 
spots that have undergone a high artificial 
cultivation, and, in some of nature's milder 
or some of her grander scenes, look quietly 
upon her and get into communion with her. 
It makes a man the better able to go back 
to his daily employment. Change of scene 
helps the mind. It had that influence on 
Elijah. In a lower degree, the pastor who 
leaves his place after a season of hard la- 
bor, and spends some weeks in rural retire- 
ment or on a mountain-height, is not wast- 
ing his time, but strengthening himself the 
better for his future work. 

Following that, God showed the prophet 



114 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

that the true cause was not at so low an 
ebb as he in his despondency thought it 
was. He was not alone in the service of 
Jehovah. Seven thousand Israelites had 
continued faithful ; not a large number, it 
was true, but still better than he thought. 
Things are generally more favorable than 
men in their desponding moods imagine. 

The Lord also provided a companion and 
a helper for his servant in the future. Hith- 
erto he had been a solitary man — alone in 
his work. Alone ! alone ! alone ! he de- 
clares on three different occasions. And a 
man who has not some very close friend to 
whom he may freely unbosom himself, and 
from whom he may receive sympathy in sor- 
row and appreciation in success, is really in 
a very weak condition. Hence, from that 
time forward, after this revelation of weak- 
ness in Elijah, Elisha became his constant 
companion. 

Then, to crown the whole, God refused to 
answer the prayer for a solitary death under 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. 1 1 5 

the juniper tree— "O Lord, take away my 
life/* But the Lord had something more glo- 
rious for him than such an obscure end. The 
translation by a whirlwind into heaven ten 
years later was better and grander. The Lord 
does not answer all the petitions of his people 
as they present them. What a blessing it is 
that he does not ! For they often ask what 
they think would be a good, as in his state 
of mind Elijah thought death would be a 
good to him ; but God refuses because he 
has for them something better. Involved 
in the efficacy of prayer is the recognition 
of God as knowing the best way to answer. 
The great prophet does not seem ever to 
have fallen again into a desponding frame 
of mind. He came forth from that episode 
in his history strengthened, and was always 
afterward himself as the grace of God had 
made him. But the effects of his temporary 
lapse remained. And there are three grand 
permanent lessons which may be derived 
from the episode. 



Il6 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

(i.) Behold an illustration of the way in 
which God sometimes permits breaks in the 
progress of his work. 

At the close of the fire-contest on Car- 
mel how favorable everything appeared to 
be for a revolution which would have swept 
the heathen Jezebel from the throne and re- 
established the worship of Jehovah in its 
purity ! The people were excited. They 
had been compelled to cry out, " Jehovah, 
he is God ! Jehovah, he is God !" All that 
was needed was a leader to stimulate and 
direct them ; for great leaders are needed 
in the world and in the Church — men of in- 
tellect; men of education ; men of courage ; 
men who dare to resist the wrong, to run 
against the multitude when they are misled, 
to guide them when they are aroused to a 
desire to do right, to burst the shackles of 
party when the hacks of the party show that 
they would sacrifice the public good rather 
than lose their influence and emoluments, 
to rise above a temporary clamor and do 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. 1 1/ 

what their consciences tell them is right, 
even though for a time it be under a cloud. 
Such men are needed. The masses cannot 
do much without them. 

All party-men do not believe this. I re- 
member a conversation which I had a few 
years ago with an excellent young man who 
belonged to the class of politicians that have 
a good deal to do with party machinery. Just 
at that time the most of the leaders of the 
organization to which he belonged were try- 
ing to force it into a measure which, it was 
afterward seen, would have been suicidal. 
Some of the very able men of the party, 
however, strove against it and prevented it. 
They were men of fine intellect, strong will, 
and unimpeachable moral character. My 
friend, referring to them with great disap- 
probation because they were running against 
the will of the smaller lights, said bitterly 
that he believed great men were really a 
curse to a country! A curse — because, 
with their clear mind seeing the inevitable 



Il8 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

results of the proposed procedure, and with 
their strong will daring to resist what they 
believed to be wrong, and with their influ- 
ence swaying the people finally to their 
side ! A curse — because the little, selfish, 
narrow-minded men could not rule. Ah ! 
may God continue to curse us, as he has 
done hitherto at critical emergencies, with 
such men, and keep our people "amenable 
to that control to which it is the glory of 
free nations to submit themselves — the con- 
trol of superior minds " ! * 

It is very true that history is largely made 
up of the bad actions of extraordinary men; 
that the most noted destroyers and deceiv- 
ers of our species, all the founders of arbi- 
trary governments and false religions, were 
extraordinary men ; and that nine-tenths of 
the calamities which have befallen the hu- 
man race had their origin in the union of 
high intelligence with low desires, f But 

* Macaulay's Hist, of England, viii., p. 131. 
f Macaulay's " Essay on Bacon." 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. II9 

when God raises up, in the Church or in the 
state, men of great mind and noble heart as 
leaders, he gives the people one of the great- 
est blessings. Generally circumstances fash- 
ion them, and they in turn fashion circum- 
stances as the car of progress needs them. 
"The real rulers of our world are few in 
any community or under any form of gov- 
ernment. They are always dangerous when 
there is a low degree of virtue or intelli- 
gence among those whom they represent. 
Certain it is that their power is nearly ab- 
solute when they are sustained by passion 
or prejudice. . . . The liberties of Rome 
were not overturned by fanatical rulers, but 
by those who availed themselves of the pas- 
sions which they themselves did not feel, in 
order to compass their selfish ends. And 
that is the great danger in republics— that 
bad men rise by the suffrage of foolish peo- 
ple, whom they deceive by affecting to fall in 
with their wishes." * 

* Lord's Old Roman World, p. 216. 



120 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

But if a great leader fails when he is 
most needed, what a public calamity it is ! 

And just at the critical moment Elijah 
failed ! He abandoned his post. When he 
ought to have been in Samaria or Jezreel 
restoring the true religion, he was in Ara- 
bia, censured by God with the question, 
" What doest thou here, Elijah ?" Jezebel 
continued for years to have her own way. 
When Elijah reappeared he was not able 
to catch up the dropped thread of his work. 
The strength of the man who ought to have 
drawn the ark forward and upward gave 
out, and the ark retrograded. 

The Almighty does his work on earth 
through human instruments, and the most 
important of human instruments sometimes 
sadly break. 

Yet behind this is an important fact which 
was symbolized in the Horeb revelation. 
God does not move his Church and his 
cause forward through the passionate ex- 
citement of men. He uses the enlightened 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. 121 

reason, judgment, conscience, for its real 
development and advancement. The Is- 
raelites had been excited by the Carmel 
conflict, but that was not sufficient: an- 
other kind of training was needed to restore 
them ; and that was a matter of time. 

" The method of providence in history is 
never magical. In proportion to the mag- 
nitude of the catastrophe are the length of 
time and the variety of agencies which are 
employed in producing it." * 

God permitted four thousand years to 
pass after the Fall and after the promise of 
the Redeemer before the Saviour appeared 
on the earth. Through all that period a 
necessary though slow work of preparation 
was in progress among the Gentiles and 
among the Jews. Nearly nineteen hun- 
dred years have passed, and yet immense 
tracts of the world have not been touched 
by Christianity. 

Very slow — very slow indeed — to human 

* Fisher's History of the Reformation. 



122 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

eyes appears to be the course of the Church 
of God. But progress it makes, though 
sometimes, if you look only at little seg- 
ments of it, there might appear to be none. 
What a brilliant historian has said of his 
country is pre-eminently true of the history 
of the religion of Jesus. Its progress re- 
sembles the motion of the sea when the 
tide is rising : " Each successive wave 
rushes forward, breaks and rolls back, but 
the great flood is steadily coming in. A 
person who looked on the waters only for 
a moment might fancy that they were retir- 
ing. A person who looked on them only 
for five minutes might fancy that they were 
rushing capriciously to and fro. But when 
he keeps his eye on them for a quarter of 
an hour, and sees one sea-mark disappear 
after another, it is impossible for him to 
doubt of the general direction in which 
the ocean is moving." Not in a straight 
line, but by advancing orbits is the course 
of history. 



GOD'S WORK, AND BIS AGENTS. 1 23 

God did not use the great and exciting 
day's contest on Carmel to make a sudden 
and long stride for his religion. One lesson 
from this, for all ages, is that force and 
animal and emotional excitement are not 
the agencies that he employs for the spread 
of true spirituality. The only instrumen- 
tality that he owns is the truth — the efficient 
power, that of the Holy Spirit. We may 
resort to other means to hasten his work, 
but in the real accomplishment of it they 
will fail. By various theatrical appliances 
a congregation may be stirred up and fired 
to a fever-heat, and, under the artificial 
high-pressure, numerous conversions may 
be reported. But all that may only burn 
over the neighborhood, and, in the end, hurt 
religion in the way in which the world looks 
at it. The real work is done only by the 
Spirit, through the instrumentality of the 
truth plainly presented. Sometimes in the 
Church at large, or in a particular congre- 
gation, we may think it moves not rapidly 



124 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

enough; but the sovereignty is God's in 
the extent* to which he will make it suc- 
cessful. 

(2.) Behold in Elijah an illustration of 
the apparent failure on the part of a great 
man in doing the work to which the Lord 
had called him. 

When he asked God to let him die, he 
felt that he had been unsuccessful. And 
from his own point of view and that of his 
contemporaries such was the case. 

More than that, his subsequent ministry 
must have been looked upon in the same 
light. His mission was that of a warfare 
against the vicious irreligion which sat upon 
the throne and prevailed through the nation 
of Israel. But when he was taken from the 
earth, that religion still existed and reigned, 
and seemed to have lost none of its power. 
Jezebel, whose threat drove the prophet 
from the kingdom at the moment when 
victory seemed to be in his grasp, lived for 
about fourteen years after he disappeared 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. 1 25 

from the earth ; and to the last her influ- 
ence was felt in Israel, and in Judah also. 
No doubt her minions were often in the 
habit of talking about the unavailing strug- 
gles which the rough-looking man of God 
had made against her and against her re- 
ligion. 

To the world the life of Elijah seemed 
to be a wretched failure. He left his nation 
as he found it at the commencement of his 
ministry — sunk in irreligion and vice. For 
thirteen or fourteen years he struggled 
against the current of his day and people : 
an earnest man of prayer ; a strict wor- 
shiper of the Most High ; a preacher of 
righteousness in conflict with the corruption 
that prevailed in high places and in low ; a 
worker of miracles which could not but 
startle the people : and yet he disappeared 
at the end, with only one personal attendant 
in his company, with a few students in the 
schools of the prophets watching his course 
from a distance, with no following among 



126 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAA T . 

the people- — the seven thousand who may 
have remained in heart and in life faithful 
to Jehovah making no move under his lead 
to rid themselves of the debauching hea- 
then religion, 

Did not his great antitype, John the Bap- 
tist, appear to be as great a failure ? For 
a little while the multitude hung upon his 
burning words of rude and stern eloquence 
and submitted to his baptism ; but on the 
clamor of a vile woman, who had been of- 
fended by his faithfulness, he was murdered 
in a prison, and his head was carried, as a 
dainty morsel, on a plate to the room of 
the lewd conspirators against his life. 
Moreover, the words which he preached 
and the work that he wrought placed no 
permanent obstacle in the career of sin 
down which the Jewish nation was running. 
Nor did they prepare the hearts of many 
for the reception of Jesus. Only two or 
three of his disciples, guided by him, be- 
came the devoted followers of the Re- 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. \2J 

deemer, and, as his apostles, helped to 
extend his Church. 

The life of Jesus himself — what a failure 
that appeared to be to the men of his day, 
especially to his enemies who put him to 
death ! In spite of his pure and holy life, 
his beautiful and inspiring words, his mi- 
raculous and beneficent deeds, he was 
nailed to the cross, no hand being raised 
to deliver him, no voice heard to cry out 
shame on the horrid murder when Pilate, 
through the importunity of the priests, 
passed the sentence of death upon him. 
Think you that the Scribes and Pharisees, 
hypocrites who hated him because his in- 
structions were a sweeping condemnation 
of their teachings and lives, did not on 
the night of his crucifixion consider that 
he had met with a disgraceful defeat? 

But did he really fail? Nay, verily. 
"From that very hour of defeat and death 
there went forth the world's life — from that 
very moment of apparent failure there pro- 



128 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

ceeded forth into the ages the spirit of the 
conquering cross." The death itself was 
a triumph over death ; and the divine words 
which were uttered during the short life that 
preceded it have gone forth conquering 
and to conquer, from soul to soul and 
from nation to nation. 

And Elijah — the very thing that God re- 
vealed to him in the vision of Horeb was 
that his work should proceed — that it 
should not cease with his disappearance 
from earth, but that Hazael and Jehu and 
Elisha, prepared by him, would do it suc- 
cessfully. Ever since, too, his example and 
his spirit have been abroad in the world, 
protesting against sin and preparing the 
way for the Messiah. 

Jezebel gloated over the prophet as a 
conquered man ; God, by translating him, 
pronounced him a man without a peer on 
earth and in heaven. 

Many a great man has, like him, seemed 
to himself and to his own generation to 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. 1 29 

have been unsuccessful ; and so many a 
man of smaller mind, but large and conse- 
crated heart, in a lower position, has been 
looked upon by his little world. But in the 
kingdom of heaven success will be written 
against the name and all over the life. 

More than two centuries ago the English 
nation rose in rebellion against Charles I., 
one of the meanest of their monarchs ; and 
beneath the lead of some of the truest of 
patriots established a better government, 
which, under the guidance of Cromwell, 
though perverted in some of its essential 
elements, made the country a power in the 
earth. But a reaction took place after the 
death of Oliver. The debased son of the 
faithless monarch was restored. Contempt 
was poured upon the names and the re- 
mains of the Parliamentary leaders who 
had overthrown the king. The body of 
Cromwell was taken from its grave and 
hung upon a scaffold. "All London 
crowded to shout and laugh around the 



I30 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

gibbet where hung the rotting remains of 
a prince who had made England the dread 
of the world; who had been the chief found- 
er of her maritime greatness and of her co- 
lonial empire ; who had conquered Scotland 
and Ireland ; who had humbled Holland 
and Spain ; the terror of whose name had 
been as a guard around every English trav- 
eler in remote countries and around every 
Protestant congregation in the hearts of 
Catholic empires. ,, * 

But was the work of that generation of 
stout-hearted, hard-headed, blow-dealing Pu- 
ritans really lost ? Nay : its principles re- 
appeared in a purer form in the Revolution 
of 1688, and higher and purer still in the 
American Revolution of 1776; and have 
ever since been leavening the nations with 
true liberty, law and order. 

A brilliant preacher has said, perhaps 
with a tinge of exaggeration caused by his 
own personal feelings, that " man is to de- 

* Macaulay's England, iii., p. 289. 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. 131 

sire success ; but success rarely comes. 
The wisest has written upon life, ' All is 
vanity ' — that is, nothingness. The trades- 
man sees the noble fortune for which he 
lived, every coin of which is the represen- 
tative of so much time and labor spent, 
squandered by a spendthrift son. The 
purest statesmen find themselves at last 
neglected and rewarded by defeat. Almost 
never can a man look back on life and say 
that its anticipations have been realized. For 
the most part, life is a disappointment, and 
the moments in which this is keenly realized 
are moments like those of Elijah." * 

But, after all, " in God's world, for those 
that are in earnest, there is no real failure. 
No work truly done, no word earnestly 
spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever 
made in vain." The apparent success, to 
the eye of man, may not be immediate, but 
it works on in circles widening for ever 
and ever. 

* F. W. Robertson. 



132 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

There is an apparent, a superficial, a 
fleeting success which may be commanded 
very hastily by the most ordinary minds — 
like the effervescence of a fermenting 
liquor which is really poisonous. This 
may be enjoyed by a shrewd, heartless and 
dishonest business-man who will do any- 
thing to make a dollar, and will hoard it 
when made. It may be organized by the 
politician who will pander to party mana- 
gers and believe in men more than princi- 
ples. It may be sensationalized by a min- 
ister and a church w T ho will depend on 
something else than the earnest exhibi- 
tion of the truth and the scriptural wor- 
ship of God to gather and to hold a con- 
gregation ; for there are multitudes of peo- 
ple who, unused to real, scriptural, thought- 
ful, preaching and accustomed to wild ranting 
and waves of physical emotion, are like the 
boy in The Heart of Midlothian, who pushed 
away the lady's guineas with contempt and 
insisted on having white money — preferring 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. 133 

the silver with which he was familiar, and 
which was constantly passing about from 
hand to hand, to the gold which he had 
never before seen and with the value of 
which he was unacquainted. 

When a man is blessed with immediate 
and manifest success in his business or pro- 
fession, or in some work for God, it is very 
pleasant and exhilarating and to be ac- 
knowledged with gratitude. But when 
success is delayed or withheld, the words 
of a thoughtful writer may be comforting : 
" I confess that increasing years bring with 
them an increasing respect for men who do 
not succeed in life, as these words are com- 
monly used. Ill-success sometimes arises 
from a conscience too sensitive, a taste too 
fastidious, a self-forgetfulness too romantic, 
a modesty too retiring. I will not go so 
far as to say with a living poet that the 
world knows nothing of its greatest men ; 
but there are forms of greatness, or at 
least of excellence, which die and make no 



134 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

sign ; there are martyrs that miss the palm, 
but not the stake ; heroes without the lau- 
rel, and conquerors without the triumph. ,, 

But oftentimes ''apparent defeat is real 
victory, and there is a heaven for those who 
have nobly and truly failed on earth. " * 

11 Well done " — not successful, but — "good 
and faithful servant!" will be the reward- 
ing judgment by the great Judge. 

(3.) Behold in God's treatment of Elijah 
an illustration of the tenderness with which 
he deals with his people when depressed 
and sad because apparently failing. 

He did not reprove the prophet for that 
weakness and despondency, and for that im- 
patient prayer, which were the result of an 
overwrought and overstrung physical sys- 
tem ; though, when strength was regained, 
he did tenderly rebuke him for his absence 
from his post by the question, " What doest 
thou here, Elijah ?" 

* F. W. Robertson. 



GOD'S WORK, AND HIS AGENTS. 1 35 

As beneath the juniper tree the Lord 
soothed him into a refreshing slumber and 
furnished him with needed food, and then 
kindly corrected his error, so all through 
his life he kept him under his protection. 
He commanded the ravens to feed him. 
He put it into the heart of the woman of 
Sarepta to share her scanty supply with 
him. He provided a faithful companion 
for him. And then he translated him to 
the ineffable glory and bliss of his pres- 
ence in heaven. 

A bruised reed the Divine One will not 
break, and a smoking flax will he not 
quench. Many a dull state spiritually is 
due to an unstrung system physically; and 
the Redeemer looks upon it with a tender 
and compassionate eye. 

Moreover, he always provides for his 
people who are faithful — whether in high or 
low positions — in different ways from that 
in which he looked after Elijah, but yet as 
really. He does not always give them 



I36 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

what they would like and as they would 
like it. He does not always make them 
successful according to their own precon- 
ceived idea. Elijah was sometimes in diffi- 
cult straits — dependent on ravens ! on a 
poor widow ! But provided for, and at last 
gloriously rewarded ! So God still permits 
many of his people to suffer much and to 
want many things. But he watches over 
them all most tenderly ; and when their 
work is over he takes them to the land of 
full deliverance. " The world will support 
you when you have constrained its votes 
by a manifestation of power, and shrink from 
you when power and greatness are no longer 
on your side." But so will not God do. 

After all, which was the better and hap- 
pier life — that of the pampered Ahab and 
Jezebel in the ivory palace of Samaria and 
the country-seat of Jezreel, with all that 
wealth could provide, and then their death 
of infamy and an abode in hell ; or the 
coarser life of Elijah, with his scanty fare at 



GOD'S WORK, AND II IS AGENTS. I 37 

times, but then his bright translation and 
the unfailing glory of his heavenly abode? 
Christian, whether suffering or rejoicing, 
in want or in abundance, exhilarated in soul 
or despondent, hold on to your faith in God 
and patiently persevere in your daily life, 
though it may be obscure ; do honestly and 
conscientiously your work for others and 
for God in the station in which he has 
placed you ; keep on at it in spite of ap- 
parent defeat, want of success, discourage- 
ment, failure of heart and skeptical ques- 
tioning of soul ; live and labor on in the 
fear of God until he sends his angel to 
bear your soul aloft to the glory in which 
bask all his glorified people. 



IV. 




THE CHURCH AND IMMOR- 
TALITY. 

FEW beautifully-variegated pieces 
of glass in the kaleidoscope form, 
by the rotation of the instrument, 
an almost endless succession of richly- 
colored pictures. New arrangements and 
new combinations are made by every turn, 
but the pieces behind the glass and within 
the tube are few in number and in them- 
selves quite insignificant. 

Like to this is the exhibition which may 
be made of the biographical and historical 
facts that have been preserved in the Bible. 
Nowhere else do we find such careful con- 
densation and selection of incidents. Very 
small in number are the acts and the words 

138 



THE CHURCH AXD IMMORTALITY. 1 39 

of any of the great scriptural characters 
who have thus been embalmed. Some of 
the facts might appear in themselves to be 
trivial, while others are of manifest and far- 
reaching importance ; but all are selected 
because of some general truth to be learned 
from them in future ages. Never do they 
lose their freshness of interest. The man 
who has read them year after year, scores 
of times, sees new beauties and new appli- 
cations in them on every perusal. The 
more he meditates upon them, the greater 
and the more widespread are the lessons 
they teach. It is not with them as Plutarch 
tells us it was with the defence which a law- 
yer, Lysias, wrote for a man who was to be 
tried by one of the Athenian tribunals. 
The speech was written by the lawyer, to 
be committed to memory by the defendant 
and delivered by him in court. "Long be- 
fore the defendant had learned the speech 
by heart he became so much dissatisfied 
with it that he went in great distress to the 



140 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

author. % I was delighted with your speech 
the first time I read it ; but I liked it less 
the second time, and still less the third 
time ; and now it seems to me to be no de- 
fence at all/ — ' My good friend/ said Lysias, 
' you quite forget that the judges are to 
hear it only once/ " But the force a,nd 
beauty and application of these scriptural 
narratives do not vanish on a reperusal, as 
does the value of many merely human 
compositions. They are capable of almost 
endless combinations and applications in 
the general light of the Bible and by the 
turning touch of a thoughtful mind. 

In a pre-eminent degree does this remark 
apply to the life of Elijah. Very few of the 
acts and words which made up his twelve 
or fourteen years' ministry have been pre- 
served. We can quickly count them on our 
fingers. But when we place them under the 
full light of God's Word and revolve them 
in the mind, they make one gorgeous pic- 
ture after another, and on all sides burst 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. 141 

forth flashes of light which strike human na- 
ture in numerous relations. A superficial 
person may think that the facts are soon 
grasped and sounded. But series after 
series of lessons shoot up with every turn 
of the instrument and upon every glance 
of the eye. The same facts appear and reap- 
pear in every view — the same, yet different. 
A special New Testament turn of the 
kaleidoscope will arrange these facts of 
Elijah's life in a threefold combination, and 
illustrate (i) God's preservation of his 
Church ; (2) his wide love and the true 
catholicity of his Church ; (3) the exhil- 
arating views of the future under which his 
people have always lived. These are the 
three great points to confirm which the 
New Testament appeals to this portion of 
the ancient history. 

(1.) God has always preserved for him- 
self in the world a true people. The 
Church is indestructible. 



142 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

The apostle Paul, in Romans xi 2-4, 
exclaims: " Wot ye not what the Scripture 
saith of Elias ? How he maketh interces- 
sion to God against Israel, saying, Lord, 
they have killed thy prophets and digged 
down thine altars ; and I am left alone, and 
they seek my life ? But what saith the an- 
swer of God to him ? I have reserved to 
myself seven thousand men who have not 
bowed the knee to Baal." 

Recall again the circumstances to which 
the apostle refers. Elijah had triumphed 
over the priests of Baal on Carmel. 
But, overcome by fear, he had fled from 
the threat of Jezebel, and, depressed and 
gloomy in mind through the prostration 
of his physical system, he felt that his mis- 
sion had failed. The nation had utterly 
and entirely apostatized from God. The 
wicked blandishments of the masculine 
heathen queen and the consuming fires of 
persecution had burned the Church of God 
out of the land. Apparently, there were 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. 143 

left " none but this Elijah, shining like a 
star in the ^reat darkness." Therefore he 
preferred to die. But, in truth, there were 
seven thousand who had remained faithful 
to the true God. 

I suspect the condition of the nation was 
then somewhat analogous to that of the Eng- 
lish people in Reformation times. In Eng- 
land, different in this respect from Scotland 
and Geneva, and largely from Germany, the 
Reformation was predominantly a state and 
political movement; and a superficial read- 
er of the history is astonished by the ease 
w r ith which the nation seemed to change its 
opinions under Henry VIII., under Edward 
VI., under Mary, under Elizabeth, backward 
and forward from Romanism to a half- 
Protestantism, from semi-Protestantism to 
Romanism, and from Romanism to Protest- 
antism again. But, says one of its histo- 
rians, " We believe that the people whose 
minds were made up on either side, who 
were inclined to make any sacrifice or 



144 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

run any risk for either religion, were very 
few. Each side had a few enterprising 
champions and a few stout-hearted mar- 
tyrs ; but the nation, undetermined in its 
opinions and feelings, resigned itself im- 
plicitly to the guidance of the government, 
and lent to the sovereign for the time being 
an equally ready aid against either of the 
extreme parties. ... In plain words, they 
did not think the difference between the 
hostile sects worth a strucrcrle. There was 
undoubtedly a zealous Protestant party and 
a zealous Catholic party. But both these 
parties were, we believe, very small. We 
doubt whether both together made up at 
the time of Mary's death the twentieth part 
of the nation. The remaining nineteen- 
twentieths halted between the two opinions, 
and were not disposed to risk a revolution 
in the government for the purpose of giv- 
ing to either of the extreme factions an 
advantage over the other." 

Very much like this was the condition of 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. 145 

the Israelitish kingdom under Ahab. A 
small number, mainly foreigners from Sidon, 
under the fierce and imperious Jezebel, and 
those who depended upon her for prefer- 
ment, were the fiery worshipers of Baal. 
The malign influence of the court was felt 
over the nation; and the masses swayed by 
it, neither decidedly the one thing nor the 
other, were halters between Jehovah and 
Baal. They went with the court, especial- 
ly after the fires of persecution had raged 
against the followers of the true God. But 
still there was Obadiah, and there were 
the noble seven thousand, who made no 
show indeed publicly, who seem to have 
been the hidden ones of God, but who had 
not yielded to the false religion. And they 
were then the real Israel, the life-kernel in 
the hard shell of the nation. As it was 
then, so it has been and is. The ancient 
people were never fully cast away. Nor 
even yet are they in the flesh finally given 

up by God. They will be brought to the 
10 



146 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

knowledge of Jesus, and be a great bless- 
ing to the Gentile churches. 

"It is an unspeakable consolation to 
know that in times of deepest religious 
declension and most extensive defection 
from the truth the lamp of God has never 
been permitted to go out, and that a faith- 
ful remnant has ever existed — a remnant 
larger than their own drooping spirits could 
easily believe. " 

As Dean Stanley has emphasized it, this 
is a truth which, farther on and down in the 
kingdom of Judah, the greatest of all the 
prophets, who wrote for the Church in all 
ages, was commissioned to make specially 
prominent : " This is the true consolation 
of all ecclesiastical history. It is a thought 
which is but little recognized in its earlier 
and ruder stages, when the inward and 
outward are easily confounded together. 
But it is the very message of life to a more 
refined and complex age, and it was the 
keynote to the whole of Isaiah's prophe- 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. 1 47 

cies. It had, indeed, been dimly indicated 
to Elijah in the promise of the few who had 
not bowed the knee to Baal, and in the still 
small whisper which was greater than thun- 
der, earthquake and fire. But in Isaiah's 
time it first, if we may so say, became a 
living doctrine of the Jewish Church, and 
through him an inheritance of the Christian 
Church. i A remnant — the remnant/ (Isa. 
x. 20; xi. 11, 16; xxviii. 5.) This was his 
watchword. * The remnant shall return. 
(S hear- j as hub)' This was the truth con- 
stantly personified before him in the name 
of his eldest son. A remnant of good in 
the mass of corruption, a remnant saved 
from the destructive invasions of Assyria, 
a burst of spring-time in the reformation 
of Hezekiah ; and, far away in the distant 
future, a Rod out of the stem, the wornout 
stem, of Jesse, a Branch, a faithful Branch, 
out of the withered root of David. ' And 
the wilderness and the solitary place shall 
be glad, and the desert shall rejoice and 



148 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

blossom as the rose ; it shall blossom abun- 
dantly, even with joy and singing, and sor- 
row and sighing shall flee away.'"* 

In the darkest days of the papal apos- 
tasy there were scattered through Europe 
many individuals and little organizations 
that bowed not the knee to the usurper 
of the Seven-hilled City — in Italy, among 
the Waldenses, through Germany, in Scot- 
land and Ireland and England. They make 
little show in political records — no more 
than the seven thousand did in the history 
of Israel under Ahab.f They were not the 
ruling power. They were beaten down 
and despised. But they existed, and ever 
and anon their voice of protest was heard 
against the demoralizing corruption of 
popes and cardinals and priests and kings 
and people. " Where was your Church be- 

* History of the Jewish Church, ii., 501, 502. 

f One fact, however, that is made particularly prominent in 
the first volume of Green's new Popular History of England, is 
that the struggle against the papacy was in England uninter- 
mitted. 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. 1 49 

fore Luther's Reformation ?" a Romanist 
once asked of a Protestant. " Where was 
your face before it was washed this morn- 
ing ?" was the shrewd reply. But, in fact, 
the retort did not express the full truth. 
There were reformers before the great 
Reformation. The time never was when 
true spiritual believers did not exist. Prob- 
ably there was never a year when the Lord's 
Supper, as one of the great badges of the 
Church of Christ, was not observed in its 
pure and simple form and with its scrip- 
tural meaning. 

Never are truth, virtue and religion with- 
out their advocates. Is there some error 
against which you feel you should wage 
war? some good work on which you feel 
you should enter? But do you fear you 
may be alone and your efforts will be fruit- 
less ? Be assured that if you will boldly 
resist the wrong and commence the work, 
you will have not only God on your side, 
but other associates. Even if alone, stand 



I50 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

up for the right and the true, and you shall 
not remain alone. God has always kept a 
seed to serve him, and everywhere any one 
who continues faithful will find other con- 
genial spirits. 

And look ! Amid the fearful apostasy of 
the court of Israel and the enervating in- 
fluence of Jezebel over the public men of 
the nation — which was so strong that she 
could induce some of its elders to swear to 
a lie in order to murder Naboth, so that his 
vineyard might fall into Ahab's possession — 
there was, in the very house of the king, an 
Obadiah who feared the Lord and adhered 
to his worship. Whenever the conclu- 
sively exposed rascalities of men in office, 
and the more numerous false charges which 
like the frogs of Egypt creep over the land, 
tempt us to think that the whole genera- 
tion of public men are corrupt, let us be 
reassured by Obadiah's case, and be hope- 
ful that the noble and the honest have not 
died out. 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. IS I 

(2.) The life and ministry of Elijah con- 
tain one striking illustration of the true 
catholicity which has always been a feature 
of the religion of the Bible. 

When the drought and famine com- 
menced in the Holy Land the prophet was 
directed by God to go to the heathen city 
of Sarepta, and to a poor widow who was 
living there, that he might be a blessing to 
her while partaking of her hospitality. He 
was sent away from his own land, from his 
own people, to one whom the Jews re- 
garded as an outcast, that in her home he 
might spend the weary years of the national 
punishment. 

To this fact Christ made a very pointed 
reference while he was upon the earth. 
The inhabitants of Nazareth, where he lived 
as a boy and a man before he began his 
public ministry, were among the last to 
credit him with anything supernatural. 
When they heard of his miracles in other 
places they were skeptical. " Is not this 



152 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

Joseph's son ?" they sneeringly asked after 
listening to some of his wonderfully gra- 
cious words in their own synagogue. His 
" long residence in Nazareth merely as a 
townsman had made him too common, in- 
capacitating them for appreciating him 
as others did who were less familiar with 
his every-day demeanor in private life." ^ 
Therefore in a wrong spirit and in unbelief 
they wanted Capernaum's wonders done 
over again before them. But Jesus replied, 
"I tell you of a truth, many widows were 
in Israel in the days of Elias, when the 
heaven was shut up three years and six 

* Brown's Commentary . How often does it happen that the 
nearest friends and the daily associates of a boy are the last to 
see anything extraordinary in him ! One of the amusing touches 
in the biography of the historian Macaulay is found in an ac- 
count of the way in which the nephews and nieces, with whom 
he romped in the home and acted like a big boy instead of a 
sedate man, had the idea to dawn upon their mind that their 
"Uncle Tom" was a great writer whose books the world was 
wild about. Even with the pure and divine Jesus the familiarity 
of the children and men aflid women of Nazareth bred contempt, 
and they could not imagine that he had miraculous power. 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. 1 53 

months, when great famine was throughout 
all the land ; but unto none of them was 
Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Si- 
don, unto a woman that was a widow.'' 

It would scarcely have been possible to 
utter a more stinging protest against the 
narrow uncharitableness which the Jews 
had engrafted upon their divinely-given re- 
ligion. Looking upon themselves as pecu- 
liarly the chosen of God, and forgetting 
that they were chosen in trust for the salva- 
tion of the world, they were perpetually in 
danger of shutting out the Gentiles from 
saving mercy and of indulging the most 
merciless and uncharitable spirit toward 
them. But Jesus showed that the sover- 
eign grace of God had not been restricted 
to the one nation. And, as a commen- 
tary in act upon that declaration, it is sig- 
nificant to note that he also went once into 
that heathen country of Sidon, and on the 
daughter of a countrywoman of the Sa- 
repta widow performed one of his loving 



154 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

miracles ; for the woman who came to him 
pleading for a daughter that had an un- 
clean spirit, and who was willing, even as a 
dog, to have the crumbs that dropped from 
the children's hand, was a Syro-Phcenician. 

Whether the widow of Sarepta had 
through contact with the Jewish truth be- 
come a worshiper of Jehovah before Elijah 
was sent to her, or whether she was then a 
heathen, and by daily contact with the 
prophet received that truth, she is an in- 
stance of a cheering principle which has its 
illustrations every here and there through 
the Old Testament. Too many Christians 
have been tempted to overlook it. 

Never has salvation been confined to the 
visible Church. Least of all was it ever 
limited to the lineal descendants of Abra- 
ham. Job, perhaps contemporary with the 
father of the faithful, was a just and upright 
man before God and one of the redeemed 
elect, though not one of the ancient sepa- 



THE CHURCH Ai\ T D IMMORTALITY. I 55 

rated people.* Rahab of Jericho was 
brought from among the heathen into the 

* " The moral of the book of Job is the noblest protest against, 
and the loftiest refutation of, those abuses or misapprehensions 
which might naturally flow from — which did flow from — the 
Mosaic and Jewish system. The relation of God to the Israel- 
ites as their special Sovereign, of the Israelites to God as his 
chosen and peculiar people, led almost of necessity to the vulgar 
notion (and the vulgar notion spread very widely) that Jehovah 
was the national God; a greater God, indeed, than the gods of 
the neighboring and hostile nations, but still self-limited, as it 
were, to be the tutelar deity of the sons of Abraham. Again, the 
temporal rewards and punishments of the Law were sure to lead 
— and did actually lead — to the conclusion that happiness and mis- 
ery in this life were the one certain, undeniable test of the divine 
favor or disfavor. . . . What is the argument of the magnif- 
icent colloquies of Job and his comforters, of Elihu, and of the 
unrivalled close of the poem ? The direct contradiction of these 
narrow conclusions — that God is the one universal God, that over 
the mysteries of his being, the mysteries of his providential gov- 
ernment, there is the same impenetrable veil which shrouds the 
Godhead from the understanding of man. And all this, as seems 
most inevitable, is connected with the history — it may be the 
poetical and imaginative or the real history — of a man not a 
Jew ; of a man (we cannot say whether he owes his fame to the 
poem or whether the poem was grounded on his fame) sprung 
from a race kindred to — and though at many periods in deadly 
hostility with — the Jews, yet owning a common ancestor — it may 
be, rather without doubt, speaking a kindred language." — Mil- 
man's History of the fezus, i., pp. 483, 484, note. 



156 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

national organization and exalted to a pe- 
culiar place of honor in it as an ancestress 
of the Messiah. Ruth, the heathen Moab- 
itess, was also providentially reached and 
placed upon the same honored roll. 

Let us not hesitate consistently to apply 
the principle. Who can doubt that in the 
ancient world, outside the pale of the writ- 
ten revelation which was given to the nation 
from whose bosom the Messiah was to come 
in the fullness of time, traces of the prior 
revelation which God had written upon the 
human heart and given orally to the early 
fathers of the race remained widely spread ; 
and that later still, by contact with the Jew- 
ish nation, the truths of its inspired books 
became the property of others ; and that, 
through both these agencies, all over the 
heathen world men were led to live relig- 
ious lives and to be accepted by God?* 

"*" Undoubtedly there was a valuable element of truth in the 
foundation of the system which was taught by the early Christian 
teachers of the Alexandrian school. They saw in the Greek 
philosophy not sheer error, but in one view a gift of God, and a 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. I 57 

Let us believe that even now, while it is 
true that there is only the one name under 
heaven given among men whereby we 
must be saved, and that where the gospel 
is preached not a sinner who hears it can 
be saved without a penitent faith in him, 
yet as all who die i-n infancy are regene- 
rated by the Spirit and saved through the 
efficacy of the atoning blood, so, wherever 
in the great mass of humanity God has any 
of his chosen, the same omnipotent Spirit 
reaches them for their salvation. 

And let us, in our dealings with the irre- 
ligious, act under the influence of the spir- 
it which sent Elijah to the Sarepta widow 
with the blessing of the unfailing meal and 
oil, and the Redeemer to the Syro-Phoeni- 
cian sufferer with healing mercy. Restrict 

theoretical schoolmaster for Christ, like the law in the practical 
sphere. . . . The elements of truth in the heathen philosophy 
they attributed partly to the secret operation of the Logos in the 
world of reason, partly to acquaintance with the Jewish philos- 
ophy, the writings of Moses and the prophets." — Schaft's History 
of the Christian Church, i., p. 497. 



158 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

not benevolence and love to the Church. 
Within the ample folds of a true Christian 
charity embrace the unchristian, the anti- 
christian, the irreligious, and the immoral, 
doing good to them as we have opportu- 
nity and seeking to bring them to the great- 
est and highest good of all.* So Jesus 
acted ; and such should be the life of his 
disciples. 

* This is not inconsistent with the sternest and strictest hold- 
ing of the truth, and with a refusal to countenance errorists in 
their work. Dr. Culross, in his Jo/in, whom Jesus Loved (a 
charming book), commenting on the second epistle of John to 
the Elect Lady, says (pp. 169, 170) : "The charge which John 
gives is an antidote to that so-called liberality to which truth 
and falsehood are alike, and which generally ends in hating truth 
with a murderous hatred. Whatever may be done from Christian 
compassion or kindness, let it be done without hesitation or fear, 
but let it be done as compassion or kindness — in the spirit of the 
good Samaritan. John finds no fault with it and throws no hin- 
drance in its way. But keep the distinction clear between doing 
a deed of Christian beneficence and giving help to antichristian 
error. * If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, 
receive him not in your house, neither bid him God-speed; for 
he that biddeth him God-speed is partaker of his evil deeds.' 
There is a time for everything; and there is a time for crucifying 
mere good-nature as well as the lusts of the flesh." 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. 1 59 

(3.) More than upon any other life in the 
Old Testament the bright glow of immor- 
tality rests upon that of Elijah. 

It has been contended that the Old Tes- 
tament does not reveal immortality ; that 
the future existence was not used in it as 
the crowning- motive for the enforcement of 
a holy life ; but that its inducements to mo- 
rality are found in the influence of men's 
conduct on their present state of existence. 

Now, it is very true that that earlier part 
of the divine revelation does specially lay 
hold of the principle that " godliness is prof- 
itable unto all things, having promise of the 
life that now is." It insists much upon the 
fact that true religion, including as that does 
true morality, has a legitimate tendency to 
keep the body in health, to give success in 
business, to lead to long life ; and that vice 
saps the energy of soul and body, and is 
really death, slow and lingering — sometimes 
speedy — death. Along with the intensely 
devotional piety which glows in portions of 



l6o ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

it, and with the brilliant and far-reaching 
prophecies which peer down the ages, it is 
full of practical directions drawn from the 
present course of events. The charge 
which has been made against the philos- 
ophy of the ancient heathen world cannot 
be brought against the word of God. That 
philosophy " disdained to be useful and was 
content to be stationary. It dealt largely 
in theories of moral perfection which were 
so sublime that they could never be more 
than theories ; in attempts to solve insolu- 
ble enigmas ; in exhortations to the attain- 
ment of unattainable frames of mind. It 
could not condescend to the humble office 
of ministering to the comfort of human be- 
ings. All the schools contemned that of- 
fice as degrading; some censured it as 
immoral. . . . What is the highest good, 
whether pain be an evil, whether all things 
be fated, whether we can be certain of any- 
thing, whether we can be certain that we 
are certain of nothing, whether a wise man 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. l6l 

can be unhappy, whether all departures 
from right be equally reprehensible, — these 
and other questions of the same sort occu- 
pied the brains, the tongues and the pens 
of the ablest men in the civilized world 
during several centuries." * The Bible, in 
both its great divisions, cut loose from such 
speculations. It revealed positive truth ; 
it contained great facts. And it stated 
them in such a way as to fall in with the 
daily life of men from age to age, to give 
the foundation for true science and philos- 
ophy, and to anticipate the future progress 
of the human mind. The deepest and 
most advanced spiritual experience, under 
the full light of the gospel, finds in it lan- 
guage for its thorough expression ; and 
even its references to other subjects are 
shown to be most wonderfully correct. A 
very recent scientific writer has stated that 
its " narrative of creation proves so accu- 
rate as to stand the test of facts discovered 

* Macaulay's Essay on Lord Bacon, 
11 



1 62 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

long after it was written, and of scientific 
principles not established or thought of at 
that early time ;" that "the order of crea- 
tion as stated in Genesis is faultless in the 
light of modern science, and many of its 
details present the most remarkable agree- 
ment with the results of science born only 
in our own day ;" and that this is in itself 
" a most powerful proof of its divine ori- 
gin. " * In truth, the book contains the 
principle of the inductive philosophy, with 
the enforcement and exaltation of which in 
modern times the name of Lord Bacon is 
indissolubly associated, and the application 
of which had given such a tremendous im- 
pulse to the world. 

But while the present and the every-day 
practical do certainly stand out with special 
prominence in the moral system of the Old 
Testament; while the future is so much 
more clear and pervasive in the New Tes- 
tament that it is declared Christ brought 

* Dawson's Nature and the Bible, pp. 25, 26. 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. 1 63 

life and immortality to light through the 
gospel ; while the firmament of the Old 
had not the brightness which the sun in his 
power now throws back over it from the 
New, — yet, as our Divine Master himself 
taught the Sadducees of his time, the truths 
of the immortal existence of the soul and 
of the resurrection of the body underlie the 
whole of revelation, and present the su- 
preme and overruling motive for the purifi- 
cation of the life of earth.* 

The public ministry of Elijah lies be- 
tween two facts which most brilliantly bring 
this up to the surface and into the fore- 
ground. His chequered mission had in its 
beginning the enlivening light of a resur- 
rection, and it closed in the brilliant glory 
of a translation. 

Soon after he had been received as a 
guest in the lowly home of Sarepta the 

* Indeed, without this there could have been no religion in the 
earlier period ; for, as Max Miiller says, " Without a belief in 
personal immortality religion is like an arch resting on one pillar, 
like a bridge ending in an abyss." 



164 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

only son of his hostess died. Elijah cried 
to God, " O Lord, my God, I pray thee, 
let this child's soul come unto him again. 
And the Lord heard the voice of Elijah ; 
and the soul of the child came unto him 
again, and he revived. ,, 

Look at the truths that are embodied in 
that touching narrative. A human being is 
composed of soul and body. It is the abid- 
ing of the soul in the body that gives life 
to the frame. What takes place at death 
is the departure of the soul from its taber- 
nacle, not the cessation of the activity of 
the former nor the annihilation of the 
latter. 

" Cold in the dust this perished heart may lie, 
But that which warmed it once shall never die." 

When it goes away it continues under the 
power of God. If he will bring it back, 
the body will revive. 

This is the first resurrection recorded in 
the Bible. It rebukes the materialism, low 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. 1 65 

and earthly, which denies that there is a 
soul essentially different from the body. 
And it points to the possibility of life being 
restored even after it has once been lost. 

But where was the soul of that boy while 
the body was dead? Where are now the 
souls of the redeemed departed? The 
translation of the prophet has a bearing 
upon these questions, while it suggests the 
unending existence which even the bodies 
of the redeemed are to enjoy. 

Centuries before, the pre-eminently pious 
Enoch had been translated that he should 
not see death. Suddenly, mysteriously, he 
disappeared from the midst of his fellows. 
He was not : for God took him. 

To Elijah, God had made known his pur- 
pose in a like manner to honor and beat- 
ify him. In his despondency the prophet 
asked, under the juniper tree, that he 
might die — die there ; die by the hand of 
the Almighty; die alone, a wretched failure, 
a disappointed man, scared, beaten, over- 



1 66 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

come by Jezebel. But God had better 
things in store for him. His prayers for 
drought and for rain had been answered. 
But that prayer for death was not granted. 
The refusal to answer a prayer is some- 
times a greater evidence of divine love 
than would be the thing which is asked 
for. God's denials are answers. 

To Elisha, also, and to the prophets at 
Bethel and at Jericho, God had made known 
this purpose. The favored man tested the 
devotion of his successor by urging him, as 
the time for the translation approached, to 
leave him alone. But Elisha would not be 
absent from such a glorious event. They 
therefore go on towards the river Jordan. 
The students in the prophetical schools 
stand and look from a distance. They see 
Elijah roll up his mantle into a staff and 
with it strike the waters and divide them, 
so that the two can walk together on dry 
ground. They see their great leader pass 
into the Jordan, as we now stand at the 



THE CHURCH AXD IMMORTALITY. 1 67 

bedside of our beloved and see them go 
down into the flood. But Elisha is permit- 
ted to go farther and to see more. Faith- 
ful to the last, he is separated from Elijah 
only by a chariot of fire and horses of fire, 
while the latter, in soul and body, without 
seeing death, is borne aloft on a whirlwind 
"into heaven. " 

" Into heaven " ! the place of the throne 
of God ; the home of Jesus ; the abode 
of the angels ; the region of the universe 
which excels all others in brilliancy and 
splendor; the city of unspotted holiness 
and unmarred happiness. Thither Elijah 
was borne ; thither went the Redeemer 
from the gaze of his apostles ; thither 
goes every redeemed soul when at death 
it is taken out of the body ; and from it 
at the last Jesus shall come with Enoch 
and Elijah and all glorified souls to wake 
from their long sleep the bodies that have 
been resting in their graves. " We are 
born for a higher destiny than that of 



1 68 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

earth ; there is a realm where the rainbow 
never fades, where the stars will be spread 
before us like islands that slumber on the 
ocean, and where the beings that pass be- 
fore us like shadows will stay in our pres- 
ence for ever." 

Under this life and immortality the 
whole Bible glows with an eternal bright- 
ness. 

One night, eighteen hundred years ago, 
that magnificent brightness kissed the earth ; 
for, when the Redeemer was transfigured 
on the mount, Elijah and Moses came 
from that place whence, in answer to Eli- 
jah's prayer, the soul of the widow's boy 
had come, and together, while the mount 
was illuminated by heaven's glory, they 
talked with him of the decease, or depart- 
ure, or exodus which he was to accom- 
plish at Jerusalem. 

The redeeming Son of God had come 
forth from the Father and had come into 
the world ; again, he was to leave the world 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. 1 69 

and go to the Father. He, too, soul and 
body transformed and glorified, as the type 
and leader of his people, was to be carried 
up on the clouds to the throne of heaven. 
But first he was to go to death — to the 
ignominious death of the cross, and down 
from that to the rough waters of the Jor- 
dan. Just as surely, however, as he should 
die and rise again and ascend to ecstatic 
bliss, so should all who put their trust in 
him and follow him be kept in death, be 
brought forth from death, and be blessed 
with the translation of Enoch and Elijah 
and Jesus himself. 

Sinful soul ! Exposed at any and every 
moment to the visit of the death-angel, 
make your future sure and glorious by re- 
ceiving your salvation through the sacri- 
fice of the Crucified One, and by commen- « 
cing that Christian life which at last is 
glorified in the unutterable brilliancy of 
heaven. The sooner in life this is done 
the better, and the less of even selfish 



I70 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

sacrifice is called for. There is an old 
Persian fable which may illustrate one 
sad effect of a sinful course: " King Zo- 
hak gave the devil leave to kiss his shoul- 
ders. Instantly two serpents sprang out, 
who, in the fury of anger, attacked his 
head and attempted to get at his brain. 
Zohak pulled them away and tore them 
with his nails. But he found that they 
were inseparable parts of himself, and 
that what he was lacerating was his own 
flesh "! Give Satan leave to kiss you ; 
yield to his seductive temptations ; and 
vices will burst out from your system and 
devour your very life; yea, they will so 
become a part of your being itself after 
long indulgence that the effort, when 
made, to break loose from them and to 
tear them out and cast them away, will be 
sharp and harrowing : it will be tearing 
away what has become a part of the sin- 
ful self. Better never to come under 
their power ! Better not to yield to Satan's 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. 171 

overtures. If they have been indulged 
at all, better, without longer indulgence, 
to break loose from the evil, and day by 
day to be found in that manner of life 
which necessitates no convulsive, painful 
revolution, but which is always ready for 
the summons from above. 

Remember, Christian believer, that the 
true way to be ready for death is to be 
found at your appointed work, whatever it 
may be, in its own time. How expressive 
the record about Elijah and Elisha ! " It 
came to pass as they still walked on and 
talked, that behold there appeared a chariot 
of fire and horses of fire and parted them 
both asunder; and Elijah went up by a 
whirlwind into heaven. ,, As Bishop Hall 
remarks, " Surely that conference was need- 
ful, and upon matters of high importance 
to the Church and the nation, in connection 
with the promises of their covenant God ; 
otherwise we might have expected it would 
have given way to private meditation, and 



172 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

Elijah had been taken up rather from his 
knees than from his feet. But there can 
be no better posture or state for the mes- 
senger of our dissolution to find us in than 
in a diligent prosecution of our calling. 
The busy attendance on our holy vocation 
is no less pleasing to God than an imme- 
diate devotion. 

" Devotion is a part of the religious life. 
Reading the Bible, meditation, prayer, com- 
munion with God in the closet, in the 
family, in the church, are necessary and 
valuable religious duties. But they are not 
the whole of religion. That extends out 
through the daily conduct and into every 
relation of life. Faithful therein the ser- 
vant of God should be ; and if the death- 
messenger finds him faithful in it, blessed is 
he ! For then the ravishing splendor, the 
enrapturing magnificence, the ecstatic joy, 
into which the soul passes ! ■ Now we see 
through a glass darkly ; but then face to 
face/ " 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. 1 73 

In the chariot and horses of fire that came 
down to Elijah ; in the brightness that en- 
compassed him as he ascended ; in the en- 
trancing descriptions of revelation which 
give us some glimpses through the open 
door of heaven ; we see enough to thrill our 
hearts and make us long for the full enjoy- 
ment of it. But how little of it we really 
grasp! How faint our conception of it, 
with all our study and all our meditation, 
compared to that which, in a moment, in 
the twinkling of an eye, bursts upon the 
souls of those who fall asleep in Jesus, and 
by the angels are, as with an electric flash, 
borne into his glorious presence! 

"Charming thought, my brethren, of the 
change that death shall produce in us/' 
cries out an old French preacher ; " it shall 
supersede the puerilities of infancy ; it shall 
draw the curtain which conceals the objects 
of expectation. How ravished must the 
soul be when this curtain is uplifted ! In- 
stead of worshiping in these assemblies, it 



174 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

finds itself instantly elevated to the choirs 
of angels, the ten thousand times ten thou- 
sand before the Lord. Instead of hearing 
the hymns we sing to his glory, it instantly 
hears the hallelujahs of celestial spirits and 
the dread shouts of * Holy, holy, holy is 
the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full 
of his glory !' Instead of listening to this 
frail preacher, who endeavors to develop 
the imperfect notions he has imbibed in a 
confined understanding, it instantly hears 
the great Head of the Church, who is the 
Author and Finisher of our faith. Instead 
of perceiving some traces of God's perfec- 
tions in the beauties of nature, it finds it- 
self in the midst of his sublimest works, in 
the midst of the heavenly Jerusalem whose 
gates are of pearl, whose foundations are 
of precious stones, and whose walls are of 
jasper. Do we then, still fear death ? 
And have we still need of comforters when 
we approach that happy period ? And have 
we still need to resume all our constancy 



THE CHURCH AND IMMORTALITY. 1 75 

and all our fortitude to support the idea of 
dying? And is it still necessary to pluck 
us from the earth, and to tear us by force 
to the celestial abode which shall consum- 
mate our felicity ? Ah, how the prophet 
Elisha, who saw his Master ascend in the 
chariot of fire, ploughing the air on his bril- 
liant throne, and crossing the vast expanse 
which separates heaven from earth, — how 
Elisha regretted the absence of so worthy 
a master, whom he now saw no more, and 
whom he must never see in life ! how he 
cried in that moment, * My father, my father, 
the chariot of Israel and the horsemen 
thereof!' 

" These emotions are strikingly congenial 
to the sentiments of self-love so dear to us. 
But Elijah himself — did he fear to soar in so 
sublime a course ? Elijah, already ascended 
to the middle regions of the air, in whose 
eyes the earth appeared but as an atom re- 
tiring out of sight ; Elijah, whose head al- 
ready reached to heaven, — did Elijah regret 



I76 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

the transition he was about to complete ? 
Did he regret the world and its inhabit- 
ants ? O soul of man, regenerate soul ! 
daily called to break the fetters which unite 
thee to a mortal body, take thy flight to- 
ward heaven. Ascend this fiery chariot 
which God has sent to transport thee above 
the earth where thou dwellest. See the 
heavens which open for thy reception ; ad- 
mire the beauties and estimate the charms 
already realized by thy hope. Taste those 
ineffable delights. Anticipate the perfect 
felicity with which death is about to invest 
thee. Death himself is about to do all the 
rest — to dissipate all thy darkness and to 
crown thy hopes." * 

* Saurin's Sermons, i., p. 362. 



<^ofefe^)^ 



V. 




CHARACTER AND TRAINING 
OF THE MAN. 

HE last words of the Old Testa- 
ment, resplendent with the glory 
of the predicted Messiah, make 
this promise : " Behold, I will send you Eli- 
jah the prophet before the coming of the 
great and dreadful day of the Lord. And 
he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the 
children, and the heart of the children to 
their fathers, lest I come and smite the 
earth with a curse. ,, Mai. iv. 5, 6. 

This led to the expectation of a bodily 
return by the great prophet of fire to the 
earth before the Christ should come. Un- 
der it the Jewish mind also dwelt in a pecu- 
liar manner upon Elijah. " It was a fixed 



12 



177 



178 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

belief of the Jews that he had appeared 
again and again, as an Arabian merchant, 
to wise and good rabbis at their prayers or 
on their journeys. A seat is placed for him 
to superintend the circumcision of the Jew- 
ish children. Passover after passover the 
Jews of our own day place the paschal cup 
on the table and set the door wide open, 
believing that that is the moment when 
Elijah will reappear. When goods are 
found and no owner comes, when difficul- 
ties arise and no solution appears, the an- 
swer is, ' Put them away until Elijah 
comes/ " * 

* Stanley's Jewish Church, ii., pp. 321, 322. Milman's re- 
mark (in Hist, of the Jews, i., p. 401) is worth emphasizing: 
" The memory of Elijah as the great type and representative of 
the prophetic order sank deep into the hearts of the Jewish peo- 
ple. It was remarkable that a prophet who lived entirely in the 
revolted kingdom, among the ancestors of the Samaritans — who, 
as far as we know, never set his foot in Jerusalem — who is never 
known to have written a word — to whom were ascribed none of 
their wonderful prophetic poems — should be received by later 
Jewish tradition as the prophet, as the forerunner and harbinger 
of the Messiah." Under the divine guidance which led to this, 
it is an illustration, of the better kind, of a remark of Macaulay 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 1 79 

On two separate occasions our Divine 
Redeemer explained the meaning of the 

in his Essays, v., p. 500 : " Some individual is selected, and of- 
ten selected very injudiciously, as the representative of every great 
movement of the public mind, of every great revolution in human 
affairs ; and on this individual are concentrated all the love and 
all the hatred, all the admiration and all the contempt, which he 
ought rightfully to share with a whole party, a whole sect, a 
whole nation, a whole generation." The French Renan, with 
his accustomed naturalistic lowering, says : " Since the Jewish 
nation, in a kind of despair, had taken to reflecting upon its des- 
tiny, the imagination of the people had directed itself with affec- 
tionate concentration to the ancient prophets. Now, of all the 
personages of the past whose memory came like a dream in the 
night to agitate and excite the nation, the greatest was Elijah. 
This giant among the prophets in his savage solitude on Carmel, 
sharing the life of wild beasts, dwelling in the hollows of the 
rocks, whence from time to time he descended like a thunderbolt to 
make and unmake kings, had become, by a series of successive met- 
amorphoses, a kind of supernatural being, sometimes visible, some- 
times invisible, who had never tasted death. It was a general 
belief that Elijah would return and restore Israel. The austere 
life he had led, the terrible memories which he had left, and 
which still abide in the imagination of the East (Abdallah, the 
ferocious pasha of Acre, nearly died of fright after beholding the 
prophet in a dream standing on the mount ; in the pictures of 
the Christian churches the portrait of Elijah is surrounded with 
severed heads, and the Mussulmans themselves fear him) ; his 
threatening image, which even now seems to spread terror and 
death, his whole legend, full of vengeance and fear, produced a 



l8o ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

prediction and the sense in which the 
prophet was to reappear. 

John the Baptist, after he had been cast 
into prison by Herod, sent two of his dis- 
ciples to Jesus with an impatient, almost a 
despairing, message, which was evidently 
designed to call forth an explicit assertion 
of his Messiahship, and perhaps an interpo- 
sition of the divine power for his own de- 
liverance from prison. " Art thou he that 
should come ? or look we for another ?" 
" It seemed no doubt hard to him that his 
Master should let him lie so long in prison 
for his fidelity — useless to his Masters 
cause and a comparative stranger to his 
proceedings — after having been honored to 

lively impression on the mind, and stamped, as it were, a birth- 
mark on the results of popular throes. Whosoever aspired to 
active eminence among the people was bound to imitate Elijah ; 
and, as the solitary life had been the distinguishing peculiarity 
of this prophet, it became customary to look on ' the man of 
God ' as a hermit. It was imagined that all holy personages had 
had their period of penance, of austerity, of life in regions far 
from towns ; and a retirement to the desert became thus the con- 
dition and prelude of lofty destinies." 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. l8l 

announce and introduce him to his work 
and to the people. And since the wonders 
of his hand seemed only to increase in 
glory as he advanced, and it could not but 
be easy for him who preached deliverance 
to the captives and the opening of the 
prison to them that were bound, to put it 
into the heart of Herod to set him at lib- 
erty or to effect his liberation in spite of 
him, he at length determines to see if, 
through a message from the prison by his 
disciples, he cannot get Jesus to speak out 
his mind, and at least set his own at 
rest. . . . The message itself, indeed, was 
far from a proper one. It was peevish ; it 
was presumptuous ; it was all but despe- 
rate. He had become depressed ; he was 
losing heart ; his spirit was clouded ; heav- 
en's sweet light had to some extent de- 
parted from him ; and this message was the 
consequence/ 1 * Having sent the messen- 
gers back with his answer, Jesus pro- 

* Brown on Luke. 



1 82 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

nounced a noble eulogy on John, closing it 
with the assertion, u If ye will receive it, 
this is Elias which was for to come." Matt, 
xi. 14. 

Again, after the transfiguration of our 
Redeemer, in response to a reference to 
his coming death, the three disciples who 
had been with him on the mount asked, 
" Why, then, say the scribes that Elias must 
first come? And Jesus answered and said 
unto them, Elias truly shall first come and 
restore all things. But I say unto you that 
Elias is come already, and they knew him 
not, but have done unto him whatsoever 
they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of 
man suffer of them. Then the disciples 
understood that he spake unto them of 
John the Baptist/' 

Elijah thus reappeared in John — not per- 
sonally, not bodily, but because, as the 
angel declared in advance to Zachariah the 
father of the Forerunner, he should go be- 
fore Jesus "in the spirit and power of 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 1 83 

Ettas." He was to be the same kind of a 
man ; he was to do the same kind of a 
work ; he was to be, in character and in the 
kingdom of heaven, the successor of the 
old prophet of Ahab's days. 

No more splendid encomium could be 
pronounced upon either than to say that 
he was the peer of the other. 

In this volume I have given a pictorial 
panorama of the life of Elijah, and have 
exhibited three series of the grand lessons 
for our own days which are suggested by 
the great events of his ministry. I will now 
attempt to analyze and portray the charac- 
ter of the man who was so singularly fa- 
vored by God — the spirit and the power of 
one who shines so brightly in the kingdom 
of heaven ; the features of his person, 
physical, mental and spiritual, which we 
should take as a model. 

" There is something supremely bracing 
in coming in contact with a noble and chi* 
valrous life. When for a moment we leave 



1 84 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

the meanness, earthliness and selfishness 
which in so great a measure make up the 
every-day world, and rise, though in imag- 
ination only, into sympathy with the high 
aims and unshaken will of some heroic 
saint of God, we receive an impression of 
the value of righteousness and trust which 
no mere human statement can convey. It 
is like going from the noise and drudgery 
of the streets to the majesty and free air 
of the mountains. We may not be able to 
express in words what we feel, and why we 
feel, but feel we do, the power, grandeur, 
glory of the infinite. And thus it is that 
the Bible contains more of biography than 
of abstract doctrine ; for the highest and 
most absolute truths not only become sim- 
ple and pass current in the world when 
clothed in the flesh and blood of human 
history, but they attain power by awaken- 
ing sympathy. As the grasp of a hand or 
the flash of an eye is often the most elo- 
quent interpreter of goodness, so a life 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 1 85 

truly lived will impress the world better 
and more lastingly than all the dry axioms 
of duty ever penned." 

In the atmosphere of such lives we ought 
to try to live. By their example we should 
be stimulated and guided, seeking to avoid 
their sins and weaknesses and to repro- 
duce their strength and virtues. The fault 
of many is that they do not endeavor to 
copy any such high standards. " A man 
who has never seen the sun," says an old 
writer, " cannot be blamed for thinking that 
no glory can exceed that of the moon. 
The man who has seen neither moon nor 
sun cannot be blamed for talking of the 
unrivalled brightness of the morning star." 
One who has not had the opportunity to 
become acquainted with the higher lives of 
earth may be excused for stopping at lower 
models ; but if the higher are within view 
and imitation, contentment with a lower is 
inexcusable. " Be ye followers of me," says 
Paul, " even as I also of Christ." 



1 86 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

If any should be tempted to think that 
because Elijah was a prophet and inspired 
he was placed on a plane too high for imi- 
tation, let it be remembered that he is em- 
phatically declared to have been a man 
" subject to like passions as we are." 

It has been very aptly said that " there is 
in one respect a remarkable analogy be- 
tween the faces and the minds of men. 
No two faces are alike ; and yet very few 
faces deviate very widely from the common 
standard." Among the hundreds of thou- 
sands of human beings who inhabit a large 
city there is not one who will be taken on 
close inspection by his acquaintances for an- 
other ; yet a man may walk from one limit 
of it to the other without seeing one person 
in whom any feature is so overcharged that 
he will turn to stare at it. Such cases there 
are, but they are rarely met with. " An in- 
finite number of varieties lies between lim- 
its which are not very far asunder. The spe- 
cimens which pass those limits on either 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 1 87 

side form a very small minority. It is the 
same with the characters of men. Here, 
too, the varieties pass all enumeration. 
But the cases in which the deviation from 
the common standard is striking and gro- 
tesque are very few. In one mind avarice 
predominates ; in another, pride ; in a third, 
love of pleasure: just as in one counte- 
nance the nose is the most marked feature, 
while in others the chief expression lies in 
the brow or in the lines of the mouth. But 
there are very few countenances in which 
nose, brow and mouth do not contribute, 
though in an unequal degree, to the gen- 
eral effect ; and so there are very few cha- 
racters in which one overgrown propensity 
makes all others utterly insignificant." Per- 
haps the common notion is that " every man 
has one ruling passion, and that this clue, 
once known, unravels all the mysteries of 
his conduct." But, in general, human be- 
ings are " made up of a crowd of passions, 
which contend for the mastery over them 



1 88 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN, 

and govern them in turn." They live " not 
under the absolute dominion of one des- 
potic propensity, but under a mixed govern- 
ment in which a hundred powers balance 
each other." * 

In the character of Elijah, as it is re- 
flected from the sacred pages, there was 
one overruling and absorbing passion which 
marked him as the great representative of 
the prophets of Israel. That was an ex- 
clusive and overmastering devotion to God. 
It will be inspiring to see how this supreme 
devotion manifested itself, and how it was 
sustained. 

(i.) He was pre-eminently a righteous 
man. This is suggested in a significant 
manner by the reference which the apostle 
James makes to him ; for after having said, 
" The effectual fervent prayer of a right- 
eous man availeth much," he immediately 
adds : " Elias was a man subject to like 

* Macaulay's Essays, v., pp. 304, 307. 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 1 89 

passions as we are, and he prayed earn- 
estly that it might not rain : and it rained 
not on the earth by the space of three 
years and six months. And he prayed 
again, and the heaven gave rain and the 
earth brought forth her fruit." Two such 
answers to prayer indicated that Elijah 
was one of those peculiarly righteous men 
whose energetic petitions have remarkable 
power in the court of heaven. The work- 
ings of nature are under the constant con- 
trol and guidance of God. He is the great 
Force of the universe, underlying, ener- 
gizing, and directing the motion of matter 
and of spirit, which in its conservation and 
correlation produces the changes that are 
perpetually in progress on the field of cre- 
ation. Between the human mind and the 
almighty Ruler of the universe there are a 
communion and a mutual influence which 
can affect the daily working of the elements 
and of nature in all her departments. The 
firmament is " not a vault of brass inter- 



I90 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

posed between us and die higher heavens." 
Men of peculiar sanctity and energy of 
spirit have access to the divine throne. 
They have power with God ; having power 
with God, they exert an influence over the 
world of matter and of spirit ; and in emer- 
gencies when God designs to use the nat- 
ural forces as the handmaids of his provi- 
dence and grace, his Spirit prompts such 
souls to their energetic wrestling with him ; 
and so the almighty Force works down, and 
draws up, and flashes forth, in transmuta- 
tions of energy which accomplish the divine 
purpose, without jarring or disturbing the 
balance of power in the material and spirit- 
ual world. 

The righteous man is right toward God 
through a penitent faith in his saving prom- 
ises and sincere obedience to his com- 
mands ; and he is right in his dealings 
with his fellows. 

The record of Elijah's life which has been 
handed down to us contains only a few of 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 191 

the incidents of his ministry. If we knew 
more about him, we should doubtless find 
that in his private conduct and in his sev- 
eral social relations he was a man of great 
purity and correctness. Whatsoever things 
w r ere true, whatsoever things were honest, 
whatsoever things were just, whatsoever 
things were pure, whatsoever things were 
lovely, whatsoever things were of good re- 
port, were found in him. 

But the element of his righteousness 
which is made prominent in the history is 
that which he had toward God, and which 
when real always includes the human as- 
pect of it as a necessity. His simple faith 
in Jehovah and prompt obedience to him 
never wavered. When despondent through 
a mistaken conviction of the failure of his 
mission, he never thought of yielding to 
Jezebel and becoming a worshiper of Baal. 
With all the adverse influences that sur- 
rounded him, and even when he thought he 
stood alone, his faith faltered not. He was 



192 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

not a reed shaken with the wind. He was 
not clothed in soft raiment, gorgeously ap- 
pareled and living delicately in the king's 
court as a sycophantic adherent of the false 
religion that would have brought him polit- 
ical honor and worldly riches. "Alone!" 
Well, he could stand alone. It could not 
be said of him that " he resembled those 
creepers which must lean on something and 
which, as soon as their prop is removed, fall 
down in utter helplessness ;" and that " he 
could no more stand up erect and self-sup- 
ported in any cause than the ivy can rear 
itself like the oak or the wild vine shoot 
to heaven like the cedar of Lebanon." He 
was not a creeper, not an ivy, not a vine ; 
but an oak, a cedar, standing majestically 
erect in the abandoned and burnt-up king- 
dom of Ahab. A noble man, indeed, for 
imitation in this age. 

There are men in whom " the impulse 
which drives them from a party in adversity 
to a party in prosperity is as irresistible as 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. I93 

that which drives the cuckoo and the swal- 
low toward the sun when the dark and cold 
months are approaching.'' Elijah was none 
of these. From the beginning to the end, 
against all temptations, all blandishments, 
all threats, all dangers, and under all ap- 
parent discouragements, he adhered to his 
God and to his religion. His opinions 
u did not spin round like a weathercock in 
a whirlwind." He stood firmly by his faith, 
with his eye toward God ; and because he 
stood thus alone he stood the more firm- 
ly; for it is the nature of true piety to be 
strengthened and toughened by the temp- 
tations which do not uproot and destroy it. 
The storms that assail, root it more tena- 
ciously in the soil. 

(2.) The righteousness and holiness which 
were developed in Elijah were peculiarly 
active in their manifestations. 

There is a passive piety which is very 
lovely, and sometimes has a delightful in- 

13 



194 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

fluence for the cause of God. Frequently 
it has a constitutional basis. On souls 
meek, quiet, comparatively listless by na- 
ture, grace is engrafted in a gentle way 
which does not revolutionize the individ- 
ual peculiarities, but simply directs them 
in the line of thoughtful and gentle medita- 
tion on spiritual things. Occasionally, na- 
tures that have been stormy, impulsive, 
fiery, are subdued into it by heavy afflic- 
tions which the Spirit of God has used 
with a saving effect 

But this passive piety, sweet, gentle, at- 
tractive as it is in the home and social cir- 
cle, happy as it is for some souls, having a 
place as it doubtless has in the kingdom of 
God, is not the kind w r hich fights the heav- 
iest battles for God, and gives the grandest 
impulse to his work, and stems the prog- 
ress of vice and irreligion. The more ac- 
tive type is needed. 

And it was the active, combative, fervent, 
military piety that Elijah possessed. He 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. I95 

was jealous for the Lord, whose authority 
had been set at naught in the kingdom. 
He exhibited a burning and fierce zeal 
against idolatry and wrong. His whole 
appearance, stern and rugged, suggested 
this ; and the great crises of his life were 
those in which he came forth to manifest it 
as with the very power of God. He could 
not be content with quietly enjoying the 
true religion himself while those around 
him were departing from it and sinning 
against their God. Time and again, in the 
strength of his faith and the fervor of his 
zeal, he came forward to endeavor to stem 
the current and to turn the transgressors 
to the Lord. With the purity of his pri- 
vate life he. united the high purpose and 
the burning zeal of the reformer; and of 
course none but a man of private purity 
has the right to be a public reformer. 

But this high and overmastering jealousy 
for God, and this stern resistance to error, 
were not dissociated from a gentle dispo- 



I96 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

sition in Elijah. The gentler element of 
the heart flows as an under-current through 
his life, and on more than one occasion rip- 
ples above the surface. The larger part 
of his ministry, in the providence of God, 
seemed to be of the severe cast ; but at 
the very beginning of it, in the home at 
Sarepta, an incident happened which re- 
vealed " at once the tenderness of the 
prophet and how great the burden was to 
him of being apparently the instrument 
of judgment wherever he went. The 
widow's son dies, and he is reproached 
for it by the unhappy mother. Must he 
then be the harbinger of nothing but sor- 
row? In bitterness of soul he lifts the 
dead body from the bosom of the moth- 
er, carries it up to the upper room where 
he abode, lays it on his own bed, and in a 
perfect agony of prayer beseeches God to 
have mercy on him and let the child live, 
So deeply is his being stirred that three 
times over he stretches himself on the 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 1 97 

corpse with strong crying ; and the Lord 
heard him." 

The union of jealous zeal for God and 
of sternness in the public maintenance 
of the truth, with tenderness and gentle- 
ness of heart in the home, and even toward 
transgressors whom it is a duty to resist, 
is not rare. Nay, it is one of the marks 
of a truly well-balanced mind. 

In the days of the English Restoration, 
when prelacy and immorality on the throne 
united in the persecution of dissenters, 
John Bunyan was imprisoned for preach- 
ing. M He was told that if he would give 
up preaching he should be instantly libera- 
ted. He was warned that if he persisted 
in disobeying the law he would be liable 
to banishment, and that if he were found 
in England after a certain time his neck 
would be stretched. His answer was, 
* If you let me out to-day I will preach 
again to-morrow/ Year after year he lay 
patiently in a dungeon compared with 



I98 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED A/AN. 

which the worst prison now to be found 
in the island is a palace. His fortitude 
is the more extraordinary because his 
domestic feelings were unusually strong. 
Indeed, he was considered by his stern 
brethren as somewhat too fond and in- 
dulgent a parent. He had several small 
children, and among them a daughter who 
was blind, and whom he loved with pecu- 
liar tenderness. He could not, he said, 
bear even the wind to blow on her ; and 
now she must suffer cold and hunger; she 
must beg; she must be beaten. * Yet/ 
he added, ' I must, I must do it/ " The weak- 
ness of our day is that we have not too much 
of the tenderness, but too little of the over- 
mastering zeal. 

(3.) The intrepid courage which Elijah 
exhibited is the crowning element of his 
character. His unwavering faith and his 
burning zeal, under the direction of the 
Most High, brought him in collision with 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 1 99 

the reigning sentiment of his day ; but 
with a dauntless boldness he resisted and 
denounced wrong. 

There are men whose temporary safe- 
ty and advancement in stirring times are 
found in their "levity and apathy." They 
are like " those light Indian boats which are 
safe because they are pliant, which yield 
to the impact of every wave, and which 
therefore bound without danger through a 
surf in which a vessel ribbed with heart 
of oak would inevitably perish." General- 
ly, men who have no strongly-settled mor- 
al principles, but who are genial and defer- 
ential to everybody, who fall in with the 
humors of the day and the views of those 
that they have to deal with, are, even 
though vicious and dishonest, very popular 
with the greater number. It is strange, but 
true, that the easy-living and generous man, 
even though his generosity may be at the 
expense of others, is more apt to be liked 
than the sternly just, honest, truthful man, 



200 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

who may not be as serpentine in his man- 
ners, as easy in his disposition, as free in 
his bounty. The profligate Aaron Burr was 
in his day wonderfully popular with fashion- 
able ladies and with the brainless multitude, 
because his courtesy was very winning and 
his disposition liberal and generous, espe- 
cially in vice and toward the vicious. 

Elijah was none of these easy men. He 
yielded not a hair's breadth to error; nor 
did he float with the current of sin. More- 
over, he did not belong to " that section of 
society which in its dealings with gilded 
arrogance takes very good care not to err 
on the side of intolerance. " He was very 
intolerant of sin and of the false religion 
which cursed his land. The magnificence 
of his courage was exhibited in the fact 
that his sternest denunciations were not 
against the poor, the low, the powerless, 
who could not, if they would, injure him. 
That is a poor kind of faithfulness to the 
truth, and a contemptible weakness, which 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 201 

can denounce sin in the abstract, but deal 
tenderly with particular forms of sin ; which 
can score transgressions that are commit- 
ted in other congregations or neighbor- 
hoods or times, but let the iniquities 
prevalent among those who are listening 
to the speaker go scot free ; which can 
buffet children and women and uninfluen- 
tial persons who cannot resist or answer, 
but pass over the heads of mighty men 
that may be in a position to annoy the 
speaker. That was not Elijah's style of 
courage. He dared to resist the king and 
to tell him that he was the troubler of Is- 
rael, and to sentence him and his house to 
infamous deaths for his crime against Na- 
both. He dared to expostulate with the 
representatives of the nation because they 
were disgraceful halters between the true 
and the false. He dared to go to the pal- 
ace of Ahaziah and tell him that for his 
sin he should never come down from his 
bed of sickness. 



202 ELIJAH, Tl/E FAVORED MAN. 

This faithful courage is what the world 
ever needs. Nathan had it when, address- 
ing the transgressing David, after evoking 
from his own conscience a condemnation of 
the act into which he had fallen, he said 
with pointed finger, " Thou art the man." 
John the Baptist had it when he told King 
Herod that it was not lawful for him to be 
living with his brothers wife ; and thereby 
brought upon himself the deadly anger 
of the abandoned woman. Peter and 
John had it when they told the Jewish 
Sanhedrim that it was their duty to obey 
God rather than man. Luther had it when 
he said that he would go to Worms and 
declare the truth to the emperor and 
princes that were assembled there, though 
he should meet with as many devils as 
there were tiles on the house-tops. John 
Knox had it when he resisted the beau- 
tiful but false queen, and saved Scotland 
from the seven-hilled tyranny; and dis- 
charged his ministry in such a way that 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 203 

when he died the regent Morton pronoun- 
ced over his coffin the eulogy, " Here lies 
one who never feared the face of man!" 
Glorious John Knox ! stronger than Elijah 
in this: the idolatrous Jezebel did once 
frighten Elijah ; John never quailed before 
the Romish Mary. 

The minister of the gospel who would 
speak sharply to the poor, but with velvet 
tongue to the rich transgressors, who 
would not tell the same truth to a con- 
gressman, or president, or king, that he 
would to the beggar, degrades his calling. 
And the private Christian who will not 
meekly, tenderly, lovingly though decided- 
ly, resist wrong wherever it breaks forth, 
fails in the highest development of the 
Christian character. 

The man who has such courage as this 
will not be popular while he lives. Re- 
formers and plain-spoken denouncers of 
wrong seldom are popular while upon the 
scene of action. From a distance and after 



204 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

their death they are exceedingly admired, 
but they grate terribly on those whose 
errors they have to combat. Ahab and Jez- 
ebel did not like Elijah. 

The noble character which was thus ex- 
hibited by Elijah was of course the work 
of the Spirit of God. But there were two 
sources of power which were very influen- 
tially used in the development of it. 

(i.) It is evident that the prophet was a 
man of great physical strength and endur- 
ance. With a healthy and muscular frame, 
he was able on the evening of the day on 
which the struggle upon Mount Carmel 
was waged, and after all the weary excite- 
ment of that day, to run beside the chariot 
of Ahab from Carmel to Jezreel, a distance 
of at least fourteen miles, keeping up with 
the horses all the way. The man who 
could do that must have had a sinewy and 
tough body. 

Now, the physical frame has a great in- 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 205 

fluence on the development of the mind 
and on spiritual exercises. There have 
been cases in which very weak and blasted 
frames have contained powerful and sharp 
minds, though in such cases there has 
been a warp in the mind which has given 
it and its associates much unhappiness. 

For a time one of the most influential — 
but to those who have read his private life 
one of the most contemptible — of the ad- 
versaries of Christianity was the French 
Voltaire. "The constitution of his mind 
resembled the constitution of those bodies 
in which the slightest scratch of a bramble 
or the bite of a gnat never fails to fes- 
ter. . . . Though he enjoyed during his 
own lifetime the reputation of a classic ; 
though he was extolled by his contempora- 
ries above all poets, philosophers and his- 
torians ; though his works were read with 
as much delight and admiration at Moscow 
and Westminster, at Florence and Stock- 
holm, as at Paris itself, he was tormented 



206 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

by that restless jealousy which should seem 
to belong only to minds burning with the 
desire of fame and yet conscious of impo- 
tence."* 

At the other extreme, Dr. Samuel John- 
son had "an unsound mind and an unsound 
body ; great muscular strength, accompa- 
nied by much awkwardness and many in- 
firmities ; great weakness of parts, and a 
morbid propensity to slowness and procras- 
tination ; a kind and generous heart and a 
gloomy and irritable temper. . . . His 
whole life was darkened by the shadow of 
death ; and he never thought of the inevi- 
table future without horror." Yet "when 
at length the moment, dreaded through so 
many years, came close, the dark cloud 
passed away from his mind. His temper 
became unusually patient and gentle ; he 
ceased to think with terror of death ; and 
he spoke much of the mercy of God and 
the propitiation of Christ. . . . The light 

* Macaulay ? s Essays , v., p. 194. 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. ZOJ 

from heaven shone on him indeed, but not 
in a direct line or with its own pure splen- 
dor. The rays had to struggle through a 
disturbing medium; they reached him re- 
fracted, dulled, and discolored by the thick 
gloom which had settled on his soul ; and 
though they might be sufficiently clear to 
guide him, they were too dim to cheer 
him." * 

But, generally, a. tainted, weak, suffering 
body enervates the mind ; a healthy body 
gives tone to mental exercises ; though 
there are exceptions enough to the remark 
to destroy the materialistic idea that the 
physical and mental forces are correlated. 
A regenerate soul will have its freedom of 
action and its healthy development, under 
the influence of the Holy Spirit, wonderfully 
assisted by a strong physical system. Some- 
thing of Elijah's equable faith, unflagging 
zeal, and high courage was due to the 
splendid frame which he brought from his 

* Macaulay's Essay$> vi., p. 172. 



208 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

youthful life beyond the Jordan, and kept 
and strengthened by his temperate mode 
of living. He was not one of your fili- 
gree men, " pretty to look at, but too brittle 
to bear the slightest pressure/' 

Nerves are one of the penalties which 
we pay for an advancing civilization. Sav- 
ages are not annoyed by them. Hard- 
working people among ourselves do not 
suffer much from them. They afflict espe- 
cially three classes : persons in whom the 
weakness is hereditary ; those who have 
not steady and hard work in company with 
others, but have time for listless novel-read- 
ing and unhealthful introspection ; and lite- 
rary men, who are proverbially sensitive. 
Persons of all these classes, whose habits 
are sedentary, and whose business it is to 
attend to sufferers and to become the recip- 
ients of their woes, are more in danger of 
morbid mental exercises than others. They 
know what a blessing it would be to have a 
strong, tough body. 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 209 

Of course, an entirely different class — 
and very blamable — are those who by the 
practice of vices voluntarily weaken the 
body, and thus, too, harm the mind. 

"To keep the body in temperance, so- 
berness and chastity, to guard it from per- 
nicious influences, and to obey the laws of 
health, are just as much religious as they 
are moral duties. ,, 

Especially would I emphasize the duty, 
for the preservation of a sound body, of 
abstinence from intoxicating liquors. As 
John the Baptist never touched them, so 
Elijah, his great type, never did. They 
poison the physical system ; they under- 
mine and weaken it ; therefore it is wrong 
to drink them or to have anything to do 
with them. Death is in the cup. If you 
want to keep bright and healthy and sound, 
let it alone. 

(2.) While Elijah preserved his physical 
strength, he developed his soul as well by 

14 



2IO ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

frequent seasons of private meditation and 
communion with God in prayer. He had 
the passive piety which consists in that 
meditative and prayerful communion with 
the Most High ; and in that was rooted his 
strong active piety. The two are essential 
each to the healthy development of the 
other. The Christian in whom the two are 
beautifully and efficiently blended is the 
nearest to perfection. 

This habit of communion with the Divine 
throws a bright glow over Elijah's whole 
ministry. His first appearance is as a man 
who had been energetically praying to God, 
and had been commissioned to declare to 
Israel's king that the prayer was about to 
be answered by a terrible judgment upon 
the land. In the little room of the widow 
of Sarepta he is again revealed as a wres- 
tler with God in prayer. At the close of 
the Mount Carmel contest he occupies the 
attitude of supplication to God, while he 
directs his servant to go and go again seven 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 211 

times to look for the coming rain. He did 
not live constantly in the eye of the public. 
He frequently withdrew from the gaze of 
others, and by himself, or in company with 
his select associates, was making spiritual 
improvement. 

Frequent rest from labor is a necessity 
for any and every person — a necessity for 
bodily health and mental strength. Hence 
the incalculable value of the Sabbath as a 
simple sanitary measure. As one of the 
most brilliant of Englishmen — who does not, 
however, appear to have had a sufficiently 
exalted spiritual view of the day — once de- 
clared in Parliament: "The natural differ- 
ence between Campania and Spitzbergen 
is trifling when compared with the differ- 
ence between a country inhabited by men 
full of bodily and mental vigor and a coun- 
try inhabited by men sunk in bodily and 
mental decrepitude. Therefore it is that 
we are not poorer, but richer, because we 
have through many ages rested from our 



212 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

labor one day in seven. That day is not 
lost. While industry is suspended ; while 
the plough lies in the furrow ; while the ex- 
change is silent ; while no smoke ascends 
from the factory, — a process is going on 
quite as important to the wealth of nations 
as any process which is performed on more 
busy days. Man, the machine of machines, 
the machine compared with which all the 
contrivances of the Watts and the Ark- 
wrights are worthless, is repairing and 
winding up, so that he returns to his labors 
on the Monday with clearer intellect, with 
livelier spirits, with renewed corporal vig- 
or." * 

Unite with the weekly physical rest the 
improvement of the soul by the study of 
God's word, and by loving, prayerful com- 
munion with him in private; add to it 
briefer seasons of such intercourse with the 
Most High before commencing and on clos- 
ing the secular duties of each day ; au<l 

* Life and Letters of Macaiday, ii., p. 157. 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 213 

you keep pouring on the divine oil which 
both lubricates the mental and physical ma- 
chine and nourishes the fire of faith, zeal 
and courage for God. Thus was the peer- 
less soul of Elijah made a worthy occupant 
of his matchless body. 

So the grand old prophet appears before 
us : a man who, with a strong physical 
frame, had, by prayerful communion with 
God, under divine grace, developed his 
spiritual character into a steady, serene 
faith which held fast to God and his wor- 
ship amid the abounding apostasy of his 
day, and a consistent piety in his inter- 
course with his fellows ; into a burning zeal 
for the truth which made him set his face 
like a flint against irreligion and immo- 
rality ; and into an intrepid courage which 
enabled him to rebuke the high and the 
mighty, and in the end to recover his na- 
tion from the odious idolatry into which it 
had fallen. 



214 ELIJAH, THE EAVORED MAN. 

Such as he was, but toned by the full and 
the gentler influences of the gospel, in the 
essentials of his mission, and without its 
wrathful flashings, should all ministers be ; 
and as all ministers, so all Christians in 
their various spheres. 

You may not be blessed with the strong, 
the tough, the healthy, physical frame which 
Elijah had. It may be your lot to have had 
transmitted to you an organization weak- 
ened from the beginning in its very germ. 
Or, beneath what you have passed through 
— perhaps innocent, perhaps guilty on your 
part — your body may have been shattered 
and broken into a peculiar nervousness and 
sensitiveness, which at times clouds some of 
your spiritual exercises, or destroys the 
healthy and regular vigor of the mind. 
And, with that, you cannot endure as much 
as Elijah could, nor have the steady and 
serene peace which, with one exception, 
appears to have characterized his life. 

But you should guard against practices 



HIS CHARACTER AND TRAINING. 21 5 

which weaken the body still more ; or if 
blessed with a sound frame, you should 
guard against the habits and indulgences 
which have a tendency to ruin it. You 
should, by frequent meditation on the truth 
of God and prayerful communion with him, 
increase the spiritual life of the soul. 
You should, by friendly communion with 
other true Christians and with Christ 
himself, quicken its manifestations. You 
should have a sincere and honest* faith in 
God, a steady and burning zeal for him, 
and an unwavering courage to stand up for 
his truth, and to resist whatever wrong may 
cross your path. 

These things all should have. Ay, and 
in a higher degree than Elijah had; for 
as Christ said of John, who had his spirit 
and power, the least in the kingdom of 
heaven is greater than he. With the full 
gospel light we are more favorably situ- 
ated than he was, and should show even a 
nobler religious life. 



2l6 ELIJAH, THE FAVORED MAN. 

Settle not down into a selfish inactivity, 
if you are not in a high position and have 
not some great mission to fulfill. Because 
you think you cannot do heroic things, 
neglect not the little that you can do. 
Wherever God has placed you — and as you 
rise higher in life — if his providence so ex- 
alts you, in heart and in conduct ; in your 
home and social circle ; in overcoming your 
own sins and battling against the seduc- 
tions of the world and the temptations of 
Satan ; in tenderness toward the suffering 
and in stern resistance to oppressors and 
wrong-doers ; in sympathy with your fel- 
lows and in single-hearted devotion to your 
God and Redeemer, — seek to exhibit 

The Spirit and Power of Elias. 



THE END. 



